Words of Danny O'Bigbelly My idea of a good time

If this seems familiar, it’s because I’ve cut and pasted it from another site where I used to post stuff like this…

When I was a small lad, growing up in rural nowhere, the meadow next to the house had an enormous blackberry patch at one end. At least half an acre of twisted vines.

If you have never picked blackberries, you can try to imagine their vines as the bastard offspring of roses, wild grapes, and poison ivy. Twisted, intertwined, thorny, six feet tall, and nasty. But covered with sweet, sweet berries.

After the berries around the perimeter have been harvested, the only way to access the interior is by carefully unbraiding the vines and then holding them apart and then entering the core. This can be done by a six-year-old child wearing nothing but shorts and flip-flops — the flip-flops being necessary to shield ones feet from the runners on the ground, and to hold down some of the branches. It’s slow work, but since it takes a while to pick a branch clean, not too tedious.

On a bright June day, dressed in nothing but the aforementioned shorts and flip-flops, bucket in one hand, I entered the patch and began to work my way inside, filling my bucket. As I released the vines, they closed behind me. After 30 minutes or so, I could no longer see my friends who had come picking with me, and I had somewhat lost my bearings. But no worries. I couldn’t be more than two hundred yards away from my house, and if I got stuck, I could call for help and someone would find me. It had happened before.

It was a beautiful day, and blackberries were filling my bucket and my stomach, and I was seeing the inner core of the field for the first time. Strange things lived here — things I didn’t know lived so close, but were kept safe from predators by the nearly impenetrable thicket of thorny bramble. I startled pheasants — and they startled me, bursting up from the ground, their wings whistling. I found rabbit burrows and other burrows — woodchucks? badgers? I’ll never know.

This was all wonderful. I started to sketch out plans for a secret hideout for me and my friends, a clubhouse safe forever from the frightening and cootie-infested girls across the street.

That’s when I stepped on the beehive. But I didn’t realize it right away.

First one bee started pestering me. Not unusual — bees tend to think that redheads are some sort of exotic flower, so I get confused bees pestering me all the time. But then it was two bees, and then it was four, and then it was five billion bees.

This was unwelcome news. We had Africanized bees in the neighborhood — or so we all believed. We knew they’d been killing our cats, anyway. I don’t really care much about the ethnic origins of bees; I just care whether they have an established pattern of stinging things to death.

I weighed my options and made a difficult decision. I made it very quickly. I don’t know what happened next — I have no memory of the thirty seconds it must have taken to retrace my steps. My next memory is running, blood streaming behind me, empty handed and bare footed, up to the kitchen screen door, and slamming it shut behind me, having outrun the main host of bees.

I remember my mother looking somewhat annoyed that I was bleeding all over the linoleum, but then thinking better of sending me back outside. Then I remember her calling the neighbors and asking them to send over as much first aid cream as they had, and call around for more.

My bucket and flip-flops were never found.

Surprisingly, my wounds were superficial and I didn’t get that many stings — maybe a dozen. Perhaps something was looking out for me that day. My injuries weren’t nearly as bad as the time I met a strange cat and somehow decided that it really wanted to be picked up and petted — but that’s another story.