Where Did the Stories Start?

Honestly, I couldn’t tell you.  They have always been in my head.  Plus, I have always been a reader.

I grew up in the ideal location (at least I think it was).  The house sat in a huge pasture. It was the days before rampant fire ants so you could lie in the grass and find crazy things in the clouds.  I spent a lot of time barefoot and away from home.

There was a tree just down from the house with branches brushing the ground.  I could take a book and stay there most of the day without anyone knowing where I was.  Wonderful for living out the story I was reading because it could become anywhere. 

There were also a lot of climbing trees.  You could get up pretty high in some of them and they had branches large enough for me to lie on and read (I sense a re-occurring theme).  It’s a wonder I never fell out of one (correct, sisters?). 

Deeper in the woods, a creek ran the whole length of the property.  The water ran from ankle deep to holes you could swim in.  In one place, there was a tree with a branch sticking out over the water.  It had enough give to dive off into the water below.  Did I ever swim?  No.  Too many crawdads (crawfish) and snapping turtles for me. 

I did spend a lot of time with a stick in my hand plopped in the water.  Of course, it had a string tied on it and a U-nail with bacon on that.  I pulled a lot of crawdads out of that creek.  I missed a lot of them too because I was looking for Indians, aliens or dinosaurs coming out of the woods.  I never knew when I would have to fight or run.  I even wrote about it for a class assignment on description.  I used the smell of the bacon, the tug of the line and how suddenly aliens were hunting me because I was human.  The tug on the line always brought me back to the present.

I remember one time my sisters and a couple of their friends were fishing and they all got a tug on their lines at the same time.  While each one pulled, a huge turtle rose up out of the water.  They all dropped their poles and we left the area.  Picturing it in my mind today, I still see a turtle that must have been four foot around.  How would you like to be swimming and have that surface right by you?

How could I not have stories after that?