It Really was Soft Wood

I wanted to write something funny today. My efforts have not met with success. (So what else is new?) Guess I'm not feeling so silly as I am feeling the need to be silly.

Every get like that? It's like a burp that won't come out. And even when you manage to produce anything it's hardly worth being called a burp. And completely unsatisfying.

Back when I was a child (what do you mean back?) my sister, Helvie, and I would occasionally have days in which we spent an inordinate amount of time saying,

What do you want to do?

I don't know. What do you want to do?

I don't know. What do you want to do?

It drove Mother nuts, and perhaps that made it all worthwhile. Even the getting slapped and being told if we couldn't find anything to do she would find something for us. Inevitably that meant doing something without any redeeming merit whatsoever. Parents just didn't have any imagination back then.

Well, that isn't entirely so.

I don't recall the year, but one winter Mother came up with something to amuse the entire family. It was quite an achievement for her as she was not generally one to participate in games and things like that. Daddy did. Daddy loved table games and teasing and things like that. No so Mother.

But this one year she wrote a series of stories. I don't recall what any of them were. Probably because Mother deliberately left out a whole slew of nouns. Then she cut up about four dozen little rectangle pieces of paper, wrote the name of a noun on each, and shuffled them up. After supper, we sat around the table and she dealt out an equal number of pieces of paper to each. You see, our television was on the blink. Maybe the electricity was even out again. Don't remember. Just remember sitting around the table. Mother, Daddy, Mickey, Lynahr, Judayl, Gayanne, Helvie, and me. Ranell was up north.

Then Mother began reading her story. When she got to a missing noun she turned to the first person to her left. They flipped over their piece of paper and read the noun. It made for some interesting reading. This was especially so when someone flipped over the piece of paper and read, "Sour Owl Sh*t". Mother could be quite earthy.

Finding something to do back then always seemed to be an exercise in creative thinking. Living in the country it was really impossible to get anywhere. I mean anywhere different. I would hop on my bicycle and go ten miles and not see anything I couldn't see from own back yard. I used to do that, too. I'd get on my bike and go, not caring so much about where I was going, just that I was going. It wasn't the destination that mattered. It wasn't even the journey. It was just the feeling I was moving. Oh. How interesting a choice of word. Moving.

That's exactly how I feel at the moment: like I'm moving. But then I am - whether I want to or not. (I don't, by the way.) But this is the wrong kind of moving. Feels more like falling. Like when I was about forty or fifty feet up in that willow tree. I heard the snap and remember wondering about it as I fell. I turned (like a cat) as I dropped and so I saw the arms stretched out to catch me. I landed in them softly, and my weight brought both them and me down to the water's edge (the willow was growing in a swamp). There was a moment's pause before I was lifted back up to the arms' normal posture. I don't remember if that tree is still there. It had soft arms. That all I remember.

I don't know if there are any arms to catch me this time. I turn, but I can't see the bottom. I don't know what's down there, but it's coming up fast. Where are the soft arms to save me? I don't want to go splat.