All Seriousness Aside

My blog has been so serious lately, I decided to bring a little levity into it. I was reading a story in the latest Redbook magazine, and I remembered something that happened in 1973...and I started laughing all over again. I hope I can describe it so that you will at least smile!

I was pregnant with my first child...mom and dad owned a "cabin" on Lake Bistineau (for those of you not from Louisiana it's pronounced Bist-in-no'). Dad had bought a "houseboat"...using that term loosely because only one person could fit in the "house" part. It was really a boat with a camper shell on it.

Dad, Mom and I decided to go fishing on a sunny summer day. (My husband had joined the military so he was in basic training.)

With my mom, it was either all or nothing. Several times while dad was guiding the boat through all the cypress knees, mom would get a dramatic 'nibble' on her line. Dad would scream "Jerk it, Wilda" and each time, my mom would slowly pull up the line to have no worm left on the hook.

Mom refused to bait her hook, so dad or I would have to bait it for her. Dad got so frustrated he refused to bait it anymore, so I started baiting hers and my hooks while dad kept running into cypress knees. Two times dad ran into the same trunk of a tree filled with bees...and I laughingly suggested to mom that dad was trying to get her stung. Well...she decided that was what dad was trying to do...and at the same time, she was getting another nibble all her hook.

Dad was yelling "jerk it &(*&(#^W&* (his favortie curse word) and mom did.

Now I was sitting on top of the "camper shell" house on the boat and this is what I witnessed.

Mom jerked her line so hard that as she did...there was a small piece of fish on her hook going over the top of all of us, and a huge part of a fish fell back into the lake.

From my eyes it looked like mom literally jerked that poor fish's head off. And I started laughing. It became so infectious, that Mom started laughing trying to get her line untangled from a bush behind her...

I was lying on the cabin shell by this time thinking I was LITERALLY going to die laughing...mom was laughing so hard that she couldn't see what she was doing...and my dad was trying to untangle the line and now the pole wrapped around a cypress knee while we ran back into the trunk of tree that had the bees in it...

which just got funnier. I don't think I've ever laughed that hard in my whole life...to the point of breathlessness.

Well...it turned out that mom had caught a tiny bream...just a baby (which she killed by slamming the poor thing into the tree behind us). A Gar had been trying to eat the little bream as mom jerked the line up out of the water....

for just a moment there... it would have been one of the greatest fish stories ever...and we all lived without one bee sting.