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Return to Running |
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What are little girls made of made of? |
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After waking up in my bed – post party. Uncle Jake & Aunt Barb long gone down the highway in their Air Stream RV – I realized that adoption was not going to be an effective escape mechanism. The next option that I exercised was taking matters into my own hands and simply walking away. It didn’t take too much convincing to get my younger sister Susan to join forces and head out in search of the potentially greener pastures, better eats, and nicer families just a few miles down the road. We became official fugitives one sunny Spring day as Letty was well into the throes of her daily gripe on the party line. I still remember my heart pounding in my ears and the taste of a dry fearful mouth as we crept low in the ditch for the first 50 yards until we reached the State Park road and were out of her sight. As we turned down the highway and could no longer see the house, the tightness in my heart, bladder and throat gave way to a feeling of joy and lightness. We were laughing and skipping down the state highway, all around us surrounded by birch and pine, horseflies buzzing at our heads, the smells of wildflowers and marshes, walking animatedly toward that ominous roar from the lake an 1/8th of a mile away. |
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We held hands, skipped and giggled for the first few yards down the highway. "Just where are we going My-shell?" my soul twin and little bull headed sister demanded as she stopped mid skip with her hands on her hips. "We are going to the Dairy Queen in town to buy ice cream with all of these pennies in my pocket!" She smiled a sweet and familiar mixture of hope and doubt and shook her head “I don’t fink so!” She pointed behind me and I turned to see the neighbor’s Ford Falcon approaching and screech to a halt with Letty hanging out the front window. We already had a plan to deal with any type of abduction situations. That was to simply head for the ditch and pretend that we were statues, this time we froze in a mock sword fight. Out of the passenger door flew Letty "What in the HELL are you trying to do to me!" she screamed at us. She grabbed us roughly by the arms and pushed us in the back seat. My body buzzed with new fear, not of the inevitable physical punishment awaiting us, my defiant runners heart froze with the realization that it was going to be harder to get away from this woman than originally anticipated. |
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Susan warmed to the idea of running and we attempted it on a few more mornings of that Spring. It had its rewards and obvious punishments. Letty’s all time favorite punishment was like a dance – I like to think of it as “the sassy girl jitterbug”. It started with a good rough jerk to the arm to pull you close as she spun you around and you landed stomach down on her knee, just in time for a good stinging whack of the wooden spoon. I remember thinking “jitterbug” as I watched Susan’s spin around, waiting my turn and wincing in anticipation and empathy. |
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Eventually Letty opted to tie us to the clothesline during the day. She felt justified in doing this after discussing it at length with the party line girls. Susan and I became instant folk heroes that day with the neighborhood kids and our older sibs. We basked in their incredulous stares as they piled out of the school bus. We glared at them like POW’s with a plan to blow up the prison camp. The bad bomber of a brunette and the terrorist towhead amid the dandelions, under billowing sheets on the line, harnessed to the ropes. Ropes intended to tame us, when in fact they made us feel like Lee Marvin and John Wayne in the Dirty Dozen. |
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