THE RABBIT HUNT

7-4-10...THE RABBIT HUNT

As I have aged things have changed with me. I no longer dream of the future and all the great things I'm going to achieve. I am happy with the way things are most of the time. My perspective on most things has done a complete turn about.
My resistance to things like, problems, adversities, feelings, indeed my body does not respond to pain the way it always did. My feelings are much more easy to hurt and I'm finding the least thing and I go on a crying pity party. You would think that I'd have developed a shell hard as nails and not petratable by no but no I'm very vulnerable to everything and I detest that.
My Parents taught me to get up dust off my britches and keep on keeping on no matter how far my face was pushed in to the mud. I thought I would always do that and I built a wall between me and things that wanted to harm me. Somewhere or someone along the way tore my wall down and I became weak and mellow as a kitten. My fire is gone it seems. It was such a subtle thing that I didn't notice it. Getting older and losing resilience was kinda like getting fat, someone had to point it out to me.
When I get in this mode and seem to lose my fight all I need to do is start using my ability to go on back there in my child-hood and reminiscence about things. That'll do it every time but because of my slower reflexes it takes me a bit longer now.
My Grandpa (Pappa) Thomas was an honery old cuss and never a bore to be around. He told us many things that were less than the truth just for fun. Mamma didn't like it one bit but we had fun with him. He told us things like a brown cow gives chocolate milk and the moon was made of cheese and we had to have it proved to us that Pappa was just funning with us. When he told us that if we sprinkled salt on a rabbits tail we could catch it he very nearly got everyone in a bunch of trouble.
One day Brenda and I decided we would catch us a pet rabbit by golly and we knew just how to do it. We were afraid Mamma would miss her salt shaker so we just took the box and off we went. It didn't take long to find a rabbit and if you are familiar with their actions you will know that you can walk almost up to the rabbit before it hops away. I think they kind of sniff out what you are up to doing by instinct or they just like to play tag.
Here we went through the pasture chasing that critter with it staying just a bit ahead of us. The salt was flying through the air. We sneaked, it hopped. When we ran out of salt and gave up we started back home. But wait a darn minute here, which way is back? We hadn't been watching where we were going and though things looked familiar we had gone without watching and we didn't know which way was back home. We had gone a whole bunch farther than we ever had before and there was two 6 year old's lost as two gooses in a fox den. As was typical with Brenda she started hanging on to me, ripping my clothes, and we both wet our britches.
"Brenda turn loose of me you are pinching my arm", but she just dug in deeper. I was never quiet as brave as I acted but Brenda brought out something in me that made me dig in my heels. (I need some of that heel digging right now.) I said "Brenda start screaming, maybe they'll hear us". They heard us all right but the one who heard us was the old ragged man who lived in a haunted house way down in the woods by the tracks. Pappa had told us all about him. Sure He Had! and there wasn't a scrap of truth to it. Pappa always said he was gonna toughen us up and between his stories and my protectiveness of Brenda it did toughen me up.
At least when the old man came up to us we had some sense of where we were. "Run Brenda" I hollered. Well heck fire Brenda was holding on to my arm in a death grip and I was dragging her. I stopped abruptly and of course it had a sling shot affect on Brenda. She went flying past me and now she was dragging me. I mean that girl was moving on now. "Brenda, you're going the wrong way, stop". She stopped and this time I was in the sling shot smack dab in to that old man. We all went down. "Well Brenda you done it this time. He's got us now".
Poor old man had the wind knocked out of him but he was trying to laugh. That just scared us worse. He said "You girls get up off me and I'm gonna to take you home". It took some convincing on his part but we finally figured out he was a good old man even if he did stink and live in a shack. Heck his house wasn't haunted either he said. He led us up to where we could see Brenda's house, patted our backs and he was on his way.
Now we hadn't been gone long but Mamma was looking for us. We told her our story (by the way Brenda still had a vice grip on my arm). We got in trouble for taking her salt, after all a box of salt cost 10 cents and money didn't grow on trees she said.
Next time Pappa came for a visit he was told in no uncertain terms to stop lying to her kids. Pappa really thought it was funny but he knew Mamma meant business so he didn't argue with her at all. I'm not sure if he told us any more of his tales but if he did I don't remember any more run-a-ways because of it. Shoot fire, we didn't even catch that rabbit!!!