Adventures with Cousins

(For June 7, 2023)

Today, without a second thought, I swished a couple of granddaddy longlegs off some petunia blossoms. Maybe I had half-a-second thought, to make sure neither of them landed on me.

One summer at grandparents Robert and Cecilia Pearson’s place on A highway, I had a brief encounter with one that WAS crawling around on me and my cousin Gayla as we shared a lawn chair under a shade tree. We had been playing with dolls in a quiet setting, well, sorta quiet. She has four brothers and I have one and if the other cousins were around, those two boys multiplied the noisy rowdy commotion.Their sister would have been indoors, being too old to play with dolls.

In my mind, that particular granddaddy longlegs is the biggest one I have ever seen, before or since. They must not like city life. I only saw them when I came to Ripley County. Having it prance around on my bare skin petrified me. Kicking and screaming, I tried to escape the chair’s clutches. I don’t know if Gayla saw it, or if my antics were scaring her, but she was kicking and screaming, too. The squirming and squealing only seemed to tighten the chair’s hold on us, which turned up our volume and made some of the boys come running. Laughter was their only contribution to the whole terrifying incident once we finally freed ourselves from the lounger. The granddaddy longlegs probably made a frantic escape long before we did, but NOT seeing it was no consolation. Where might it be hiding?

That encounter does not diminish the joy of summertime in the country with cousins collecting frogs and lightning bugs, cleaning up in a washtub left sitting in the sun, eating tons of fried okra we helped pick and napping on quilts in front of a fan. Bundles of memories tied with love.