Spring is bustin’ out all over ’n the weeds are as high as…well, certainly not as high as an elephants eye but they’re tall enuff that when my little dogs get in ‘em, all I c’n see is the top of the weeds moving….when I wuz a boy in Beattyville, the milkweed (?) use’ta get 8 to 10 foot high…we’d cut ‘em, strip ‘em ’n throw ‘em as spears at each other…moving thru the tall milkweed wuz like the jungles in the Tarzan movies…Johnny Weissmuller wuz a fav’rit of durn near ever’body back then…we all practiced the Tarzan yell (none of us as good as Carol Burnett but we didn’t know about her back then ’n none of us ever got as good as her anyway)…but the riverbank wuz pretty much like the jungles of the movies ’n our imagination made up whatever might’a been lacking….where the creek run down thru the school hollow, there wuz lot’s of wild grapevines ’n we’d swing on ‘em the way Tarzan did in the movies….trouble wuz, unlike in the movies, our grapevines wudn’t hold much weight ’n like as not, they’d turn loose ’n drop us in the creek…wudn’t much water in the creek so that wudn’t a problem…nah, it wuz the drop itself which wuz a good 8’ or better ’n dropped us down on the rocky creek bed…..
When the milkweed dried out, you c’ud pull ‘em right out’a the ground ’n the root wuz all twisty ’n sharp pointed ’n they made excellent spears and arrows for our homemade bows cuz Errol Flynn as Robin Hood wuz just as popular as Tarzan ’n we had great fights with the milkweed arrows ’n spears flying ever’where…
When my brother, John, told his grandson about the games we played ’n our homemade bows ’n arrows ’n swords ’n spears, Noah felt sorry for him ‘cuz he’d been so deprived ’n never had any video games to play on the teevee that we didn’t have either….
“C’est la vie” said the old folks, “it just goes to show that you never can tell.” Chuck Berry
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