Anonymous Poster
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We were picking oranges in our grove on the first rain free afternoon we had had in days. This is not an altogether pleasant task. It involves a constant battle with fire ants wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets . Then you have your thorns and ’hitchhiker weeds‘ that stick to everything including clothing, hair, and in one instance that I am aware of, eyelashes. Well, that was a cow, but still. Your arms start to feel like baseball bats well within an hour, which is only natural as your hands start to resemble baseball gloves after holding these firm round objects all day. Last but not least there’s the grove itself, which on this particular day was still holding water in some spots due to the recent heavy rains, so we all had a good healthy case of wet foot.
There are five in our family, and each of us has our own unique escape mechanism to use when faced with the mundane and monotonous hours spent in the grove. I am thinking of how to spend the money from the load, my husband is worrying about getting stuck in the mud. My oldest daughter, no doubt, is lost in thoughts of her boyfriend. My youngest girl is formulating her next complaint, and waiting for the most opportune moment to voice it. Timing is everything you know. Our son, per normal, falls into this pattern of nit picking, annoying the girls, basically providing the complainer with plenty to complain about, and pushing everybody's buttons as a boy of thirteen will tend to do. I guess he figures if he has to be miserable then he’s going to share it. I have learned how to tune this out long ago, so when the ‘incident’ occurred I was caught completely by surprise and watched the following chain of events unfold helplessly.
My son apparently stepped over the line and smarted off to me. I didn’t catch it, but my husband did, and he went off like a home made firecracker. NO warning, devastating results.
I heard this low growl starting and looked up to see my better half, his face as red as a beet, his mouth moving and this sound coming out of him like he was speaking in tongues. Our son, being somewhat used to provoking this type of reaction in his dad was suddenly alert and wary, waiting for a sign that he should flee. I have seen this scenario before and knew what was going to happen next. The chase was on!
The sign my son waited for came in the form of a misplaced swat. When my husband gets like this he is apt to do things that make no sense at all and when he swatted and missed, knocking off about a dozen oranges in the process, the troublemaker took off splashing through the mud and the muck with my husband more or less on his heels. Whatever possessed him to think he could catch this kid who runs for fun, and could probably run down a rabbit if he so chose to try, is beyond me. Still on occasion he reaches his boiling point and off they go. It was kind of like watching a lion chasing a gazelle on the Serengeti. You don't really want to see the lion catch the gazelle but you're held transfixed by the whole thing and can't not watch, and you can feel the panic of the gazelle but there's not a dang thing you can do to stop that lion, you can only hope that he gets tripped up and the gazelle gets away.
If, and I say if, my son had had a mishap, slipped, charged into a tree or got hung up somehow, and my husband by some bizarre stroke of pure unadulterated luck had managed to catch him, by the time he actually got his hands on him, my son would have been screaming so long and so loud, and so gosh-darned girl-like, that they both would have collapsed into helpless laughter. Not that my husband wouldn’t give him a swat or two, just to advertise the fact that he had won for once.
So, we have this agile deer-like boy gracefully dodging trees and puddles, dancing between branches with intricate turns and leaps like the most seasoned ballet dancer, and this grizzly-like man blundering through these same puddles, drying 'em up as he went, and banging into branches, and you know by watching that God set it up this way on purpose. From my vantage point is it very clear who is in the lead and who is going to win. My youngest girl, watching this whole exchange is delighted of course, because her brother pushes her buttons on a regular basis and she wants him to suffer. She's said so. I'm watching her, and the gathering disappointment on her face when she too realizes that it’s hopeless.
We waited for the chase to end. We didn’t have to wait long. My husband is a big guy and there are VERY few things that will prompt him to run and I keep hoping someday that he will realize that short of a miracle he is not going to catch this boy. When it became clear that the chase had ended predictably, we all went back to our picking, while hubby shook his fist, rattling off all the things he would have done to him had he been able to catch him and giving him FINAL warning not to say ONE more word EVER in his pitiful life again.
"You gotta go to sleep at some point, boy" He said ominously. Thank God he has a short memory.
We finally got the trailer full and pulling it out it got stuck of course, so we spent the next two hours trying to drag this nine thousand pound trailer and tractor out of a dang swamp and finally had to summon the neighbor to bring his 'hog' (some mud slinging, jeep type thing) to pull us out so we could get the oranges to the scale before they closed. With all this going on my son had a chance to redeem himself by doing all the running for this, that, and whatever thing might be needed to get us out. He fell into grace with my husband again and was allowed to sleep peacefully that night. I guess it's true that time heals all wounds.
There are five in our family, and each of us has our own unique escape mechanism to use when faced with the mundane and monotonous hours spent in the grove. I am thinking of how to spend the money from the load, my husband is worrying about getting stuck in the mud. My oldest daughter, no doubt, is lost in thoughts of her boyfriend. My youngest girl is formulating her next complaint, and waiting for the most opportune moment to voice it. Timing is everything you know. Our son, per normal, falls into this pattern of nit picking, annoying the girls, basically providing the complainer with plenty to complain about, and pushing everybody's buttons as a boy of thirteen will tend to do. I guess he figures if he has to be miserable then he’s going to share it. I have learned how to tune this out long ago, so when the ‘incident’ occurred I was caught completely by surprise and watched the following chain of events unfold helplessly.
My son apparently stepped over the line and smarted off to me. I didn’t catch it, but my husband did, and he went off like a home made firecracker. NO warning, devastating results.
I heard this low growl starting and looked up to see my better half, his face as red as a beet, his mouth moving and this sound coming out of him like he was speaking in tongues. Our son, being somewhat used to provoking this type of reaction in his dad was suddenly alert and wary, waiting for a sign that he should flee. I have seen this scenario before and knew what was going to happen next. The chase was on!
The sign my son waited for came in the form of a misplaced swat. When my husband gets like this he is apt to do things that make no sense at all and when he swatted and missed, knocking off about a dozen oranges in the process, the troublemaker took off splashing through the mud and the muck with my husband more or less on his heels. Whatever possessed him to think he could catch this kid who runs for fun, and could probably run down a rabbit if he so chose to try, is beyond me. Still on occasion he reaches his boiling point and off they go. It was kind of like watching a lion chasing a gazelle on the Serengeti. You don't really want to see the lion catch the gazelle but you're held transfixed by the whole thing and can't not watch, and you can feel the panic of the gazelle but there's not a dang thing you can do to stop that lion, you can only hope that he gets tripped up and the gazelle gets away.
If, and I say if, my son had had a mishap, slipped, charged into a tree or got hung up somehow, and my husband by some bizarre stroke of pure unadulterated luck had managed to catch him, by the time he actually got his hands on him, my son would have been screaming so long and so loud, and so gosh-darned girl-like, that they both would have collapsed into helpless laughter. Not that my husband wouldn’t give him a swat or two, just to advertise the fact that he had won for once.
So, we have this agile deer-like boy gracefully dodging trees and puddles, dancing between branches with intricate turns and leaps like the most seasoned ballet dancer, and this grizzly-like man blundering through these same puddles, drying 'em up as he went, and banging into branches, and you know by watching that God set it up this way on purpose. From my vantage point is it very clear who is in the lead and who is going to win. My youngest girl, watching this whole exchange is delighted of course, because her brother pushes her buttons on a regular basis and she wants him to suffer. She's said so. I'm watching her, and the gathering disappointment on her face when she too realizes that it’s hopeless.
We waited for the chase to end. We didn’t have to wait long. My husband is a big guy and there are VERY few things that will prompt him to run and I keep hoping someday that he will realize that short of a miracle he is not going to catch this boy. When it became clear that the chase had ended predictably, we all went back to our picking, while hubby shook his fist, rattling off all the things he would have done to him had he been able to catch him and giving him FINAL warning not to say ONE more word EVER in his pitiful life again.
"You gotta go to sleep at some point, boy" He said ominously. Thank God he has a short memory.
We finally got the trailer full and pulling it out it got stuck of course, so we spent the next two hours trying to drag this nine thousand pound trailer and tractor out of a dang swamp and finally had to summon the neighbor to bring his 'hog' (some mud slinging, jeep type thing) to pull us out so we could get the oranges to the scale before they closed. With all this going on my son had a chance to redeem himself by doing all the running for this, that, and whatever thing might be needed to get us out. He fell into grace with my husband again and was allowed to sleep peacefully that night. I guess it's true that time heals all wounds.
