That campfire thaw gives new meaning to the expression "burning rubber" while the great baked-beans explosion takes me back to my grandparents' house, where I read in rapt attention the tale of the Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919. I'd pick up their old issue of Progressive Farmer every time we arrived and then I'd wallow in that molasses massacre. And then we'd go out and build a fort of pine branches on the Back 40 (more like a Back 10), waving at Jack the Mule as we ran and hearing my grandmother shout, "Watch out for snakes, boys!" — and inevitably we'd run into and around a copperhead, cottonmouth or king snake along the pine-needle-laden paths. Once, our beagle George sniffed a serpent too closely and wound up with a jowl the size of a small grapefruit. A trip to Dr. Garrett's vet clinic and he survived to chase another day: snakes, nutria, rabbits, possums and the like.
That campfire thaw gives new meaning to the expression "burning rubber" while the great baked-beans explosion takes me back to my grandparents' house, where I read in rapt attention the tale of the Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919. I'd pick up their old issue of Progressive Farmer every time we arrived and then I'd wallow in that molasses massacre. And then we'd go out and build a fort of pine branches on the Back 40 (more like a Back 10), waving at Jack the Mule as we ran and hearing my grandmother shout, "Watch out for snakes, boys!" — and inevitably we'd run into and around a copperhead, cottonmouth or king snake along the pine-needle-laden paths. Once, our beagle George sniffed a serpent too closely and wound up with a jowl the size of a small grapefruit. A trip to Dr. Garrett's vet clinic and he survived to chase another day: snakes, nutria, rabbits, possums and the like.