Feeling waspish, are we?
8:10 a.m.
When I was a child, my mother would bundle us three kids in the car and take us on a holiday. My dad stayed at home, citing the need to tend his garden, but I think he actually relished the silence and calm of the empty house. I was placed in the middle of the back seat between my brothers with a shisel (Yiddish for a bowl) on my lap (just in case the Grav0I failed, which it did on occasion, and there had been occasions when the shisel was nowhere to be seen or I missed it entirely), and we sang songs and played highway games as my mom proceeded to whatever vacation spot she had picked out. We didn�t ever go very far, but I did get to see places like Niagara FaIIs, Upper Canada ViIIage, and the Th0usand IsIands. In fact, now that I think about it, our travels were usually down the St. Lawrence, heading east.
On the trip in question, we had stopped at a small town near C0rnwaII called M0rrisburg where we booked into a cheap motel that had a little copse of trees with a picnic table in the midst, where my mother left me and my older brother while she and the eldest wandered off in search of a newspaper. I would have been about 5, which makes the others 8 and 12 respectively. My brother had a book, which he proceeded to read, and I had a colouring book which I proceeded to colour in with wax crayons. Unbeknownst to us, there was a large paper wasp nest nestled into one of the corners berneath the tabletop. My brother somehow disturbed it, either by kicking it or just getting too close, and they swarmed out and attacked us.
He sustained a single sting,but they went for me, the kid with the crayons. My mother and other brother were not even at the end of the parking lot when I came hurtling towards them, screaming at the top of my lungs, the hounds of hell hot on my heels. The quest for a newspaper was quickly abandoned. Instead my mother packed us in the car, drove to the nearest service station and told the guy she needed to get me to a doctor. The attendant dropped what he was doing, got in his car and told her to follow him, and he led us directly to a doctor�s office where we were attended to immediately. Only in a small town in the 60�s, eh?
Seeing the swarming mass of angry wasps in our front yard brought that whole experience back to me. I�ll have to get some dirt to fill the hole and we'll need to reseed the top of it. I just hope the raccoon or whatever critter did our job for us didn�t suffer to severely.
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