My Life As A Girl

I have been around boys all my life. I have six brothers, a dad, a son and I married a boy. I haven't learned much about this strange species but I know they love to do dangerous things. That is what binds them. They can hang a rope from a tree and take turns swinging over a fifty foot pit and they are bound for life. An evening that starts with a bag full of firecrackers and ends with a trip to the emergency room is a tale told as a warning to their children, but sounds so much like bragging.

Girls don't do this. We make prank phone calls and occasionally wrap a house. My friends and I were wrapping a house once and a man came outside and started shooting at us. I was terrified. If I had been shot my mother would have killed me.

Once my friend, Ivy and I were making taffy from a recipe in the Tina In the Kitchen cookbook. Her mom had saved up labels from The Imperial Pure Cane sugar package and sent off for the cookbook. It was really cool. Tina was on the cover in her rolled up jeans and Bobbie socks, looking like a teen queen. Anyway, we were making this taffy and it started growing like the Blob in that sci fi movie, The Blob. We stirred and stirred but it just kept growing so one of us held the pan and the other kept stirring as we walked it out to the alley and put it in the trash. Then we ran in the house screaming like little girls. Well ,we were little girls. We thought that was pretty scary and exciting.

When our little neighborhood school closed down, Ivy and I thought it would be fun to break in and see the old place one more time before they tore it down. That was kind of an adventure, ya know, and I thought I had to tell someone. Unfortunately I chose to tell my brother, Joel. Today Joel is a very nice person, but in his pre-adolescent years, he was a self righteous, tattle-telling little blackmailer, and I did dishes for him for about a year, while he threatened to tell Mom about our little breaking and entering fun.

The thing is, most of the time our adventures were all in our heads. We could dream up a monster, like the Goatman, to keep us terrified for years. On backyard camp outs our brothers would have been all over the neighborhood getting into all kinds of trouble. We, the girls, stayed in the backyard and got scared imagining trouble coming to us.

My brothers have scars from this little explosion and that little dirt bike wreck. I have some pretty bad scars from learning to shave my legs. But hey, I never enjoyed getting dirty or using too much energy just to have fun so, I'm just sayin......