Stung
a Saturday Story
My Father’s family hails from Iowa, the state of my birth. Our family left there when I was an infant, so my memories of Iowa are from our occasional summer visits. Dad was much younger than his siblings and that meant our cousins were mostly much older than me and my siblings, but Ronnie and Johnnie were close enough to our age that we did spend time doing things with them.
They lived in a two-story house in Sigourney that was not far from the Post Office and had a railroad track that ran behind the house. The backyard had a chain link fence around it and we played out there at times. To the best of my recollection, that is where we first learned about the life-endangering game you could buy at the general store called “Lawn Darts.” Somehow someone thought it was a good idea to engage children in a game that involved launching large steel darts with sharpened points through the air while standing next to the hoop targets lying on the ground at which we were supposed to aim.
One day we were kicking a soccer ball around the yard and it got kicked over the back fence toward the railroad track. I ran to retrieve it and was going to jump the fence by putting my hand on a post to use it for leverage to get myself over in one smooth motion. Everything went according to my plan and I landed safely on the other side of the fence.
But once I landed I immediately felt a sting hit me. And then another. And then another. The post on which I placed my hand didn’t have a cap on it and a nest of wasps was inside the hollow steel post. They didn’t appreciate me using their home as my booster pad.
To the confusion of my siblings and cousins, I was yelling and running down the railroad tracks away from the house as fast as I could. I circled the block, came around to the front of the house, and went inside, still smarting from the seven wasp stings on various parts of my body.
That was my first wasp encounter and there have been many others since then. Once I was atop a thirty-foot extension ladder checking out a hole in the eave of a house near Big Cabin, Oklahoma. When I reached up to examine the hole and see what could be done to fix it, a flying brigade of wasps emerged from inside the soffit and began to assault me. To the confusion of the homeowner who was sitting on the front porch watching, I slid down the ladder faster than I would have believed possible, and much like my Iowa experience, I ran across the yard and down the driveway toward the county road while swinging my hammer like a maniac. The only thing missing was the screaming. When I was a child I screamed like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish screaming.
The other day, I had a new experience with stinging. In the past, it has always been wasps. This time it was a yellow jacket. I was watering the lawn and was walking by one of the bushes in front of the house when it struck me. A family of yellow jackets had started a nest in the bush along the sidewalk.
It is the worst sting I’ve ever had. I’m glad only one of them got me. My hand was swollen, aching, and itching for quite some time.
In response, I went to the hardware store and bought some of that hornet spray stuff. It shoots out 20 feet. I came home and did a counterattack. It’s a shame that thing did that to me. We could have lived in peace and harmony, but instead, they are all dead.
I’m a “leave me alone and I will leave you alone” kind of guy. But wasps and yellow jackets live by a different code of ethics than I do.
