Who Likes Stickers?

I hope 2014 is treating all of you okay so far.

How are you doing on your resolutions?

How about your goals?

As for me, it's all good. I'm coming off a horrible cold, but it was only a cold. I can deal with that. Even with the infernal residual hacking, which I hope will soon be history.

The best news is I have finally typed THE END on my current project. Now the real work begins. I'm slotted on my editor's schedule for May 1, so there's no time to dawdle along the editing path. For me, that's a good thing.

The first month of this good year has past, and I'm still on schedule. I call that a great beginning.

A couple of weeks ago, Rula Sinara was here. She asked about stories of nature from our childhood. Two popped into my head, so I decided to share the shortest of those with you here.

I was a wee little girl, maybe five or six. We lived in an area that was actually part of a city, but at the edge, and was much more a community than a subdivision. The lots were large and, for the most part, unfenced.

The area pertaining to this story looked somewhat like this:

My BFF (who lived across the street from me) and I were often allowed to walk to the little mom and pop grocery on the street behind us to buy things like bread or milk or eggs. Neither of us could go alone, but if one mom needed something, we were both usually allowed to go.

The proviso was that we could not walk on the busy street. There were two additional requirements. We couldn't walk next to the fence surrounding the big dogs, even though there were berry bushes there. We loved berries, but the dogs were big and fierce. I think I was more afraid of them than my BFF was. I think they were actually hunting dogs and wouldn't have hurt us, but I'm not sure of that.

The second requirement was to stay off the hill.

Both of us loved the hill. We nearly always went over the hill. Now to be truthful, it wasn't much of a hill. More like a little rise in the ground. But to five-year old eyes, it was a hill. And for me, it was farther from the big dogs. They didn't even bark when we went over the hill.

So one summer day, we walked to the store. We stayed off the hill, but decided to cross it on the way back. We were both barefoot. Near the top of the hill, we walked into a sticker patch. Those sticky grassburs with thorns all the way around.

We're both hopping around and almost crying. Every time we stepped, we got more grassburs in our feet. So I sat down to pull them out . . . and got more grassburs in my little five-year old tushie.

So both of us are sitting or standing on the hill and crying. I guess my mom saw the whole act because she came running, picked both of us up, and carried us to our back porch.

How she kept from laughing, I'll never know. But she got rid of all the stickers. I don't remember, but I'm sure I got in trouble.

I never went over the hill again.

Unless I had shoes on my feet.