SCREAM!!!

Well, I am working on Part 2 of Time Flies ---but before I get on with that -- In order to get back into the every day blog writing and keep up with my writers group here's a little in between.

As I mentioned before our writer's group is just starting and it looks like fun. It will certainly help me to keep motivated to write...at our meeting a few days ago the moderator gave us one word and we had ten minutes to come up with a story....well my little pea brain wasn't working so well and when I got the word SCREAM I sat there dumbfounded for several minutes thinking of what I was going to write. I knew the others were writing feverishly but since I am not good at making stuff up just off the top of my head I had to come up with something and then this story my mother used to tell about my dad popped into my head.

It was in the fall after the corn had beeen cut and shocked and sat drying for awhile it was time to be shucked. Shucking meant taking the corn from the stalk and peeling back the husk using a corn shucker. Sometimes the neighbors would all get together for a day of "cornshuckin" which always was a good get together. Ladies would serve lunch and the first boy to find a red ear of corn got to kiss the prettiest girl. There was usually a "jug" hid around somewhere too.

One cool crisp night when the moon was full my dad and his brother took their lanterns and a jug of whiskey and went out to the corn patch to shuck for awhile. They were shucking and talking and drinking for quite awhile. My mother, curious as to what they were up to went out to see what was going on.

My uncle saw my mother sneaking up on them and said to my dad; "Roy, I heard this place is haunted, aren't you afraid since you moved out here". "No", says my dad. "You don't believe in boogers and haints?" my uncle asked. "Nah", says my dad, "I ain't never seen nothing I was scared of". My uncle egged him on by asking, "Well, what would you do if you saw something you couldn't explain?"

About that time my mother laid her hand on my dad's shoulder. My dad let out a SCREAM that could have been heard in the next holler."What the hell's going on here?", threw his cornshucker to parts unknown, jumped straight over the fodder shock, running for the back door of the house just as fast as his legs would carry him while my uncle and mother were doubled over laughing at him. That ended the cornshucking that night.

The next day my mother had to help finish shucking the corn and look for my dad's cornshucker. They found it the next spring when they were getting ready to plant corn again.

and that was my story using the word SCREAM!

That's it for today.