The Candlelight
Sanctuary
Church Page
Acquiring the Benefits of Biblical Wisdom
on Amazon.com
Buckhart Cemetery
and
Family History
Achenbach Cemetery
God Bless America
By Jerry L. Ginther
And
The Day of the Bumblebees
Until recently I had never seen a mulberry bush, but just because I'd never seen one I hadn't ruled out the possibility that they may exist. Having reasoned that they must truly exist, because a couple of children's nursery rhymes specifically say "bush" instead of "tree", I ventured to the internet to settle the conflict. There I found that in fact there is a variety called a bush. As a matter of fact, I found several varieties of mulberry trees and bushes. That said I had one particular tree in mind. For several summer seasons in my early childhood, I spent quite a few days under a mulberry tree eating the berries. As I recall, they had to be fully, drop dead, ripe or they were a little sour to the taste. So, once one found a fully ripe one nothing else would do and you passed over any that were not fat and dark purple.
Across the alley behind Grandma's house stood such a tree. It was on the Kirkendoll's side of the alley, but all of the north end kids knew about it and visited the tree when the berries were in season. When the low hanging branches were picked clean, some of the bigger kids would climb the tree and pick berries for those on the ground, gathering them in their shirt tails. I'm reasonably sure that the stains in many of those shirts never washed out as the juice from squashed mulberries is about as close to permanent marker ink as you can get. It takes many rain showers in the summer to wash the stain off of a road where mulberries have been squashed by passing cars.
Well, that isn't all that was near that same alley that we will talk about. Grandma had an old barn across from that mulberry tree. It was a small barn with just two stalls on the north end and an area for chickens in the south end. However, in my lifetime the barn never housed any animals except for a few chickens when I was very young. The stalls were used as coal bins; one for large lumps of coal for the heating stove and the other for smaller sized chunks to burn in the cook stove. There were no animals, but there was an insect that had to be removed from this old structure every couple of years. It seems the old barn was a favorite nesting site for bumblebees and I'm sure that no summer went by that I was not stung at least once. For this reason, Grandpa tried to remove them as soon as he became aware of a nest. Now, I have to tell you that tearing up their nest did not make them less of a threat to anyone on the block. Angry bumblebees were on the rampage for a week after the destruction of one of those nests.
Enter sweet, little Donna Scroggins into this story. I'm not sure of our ages at the time, but I may have been 8 years old and Donna about 7; we may have been younger. I was sitting on the back steps at Grandma's house one day when Donna came walking by on McClellan St., minding her own business, en route to her grandmother's house on the next corner. Having no idea of what she was about to encounter she wasn't in any hurry until she started past the barn. At that point she got a bit more excited and in very much of a hurry. Suddenly, she began screaming and pulling her hair and running toward her grandma Kirkendoll's house. Instantly, I knew what was taking place. Just the day before Grandpa had destroyed a nest of bumblebees inside the barn. I had also been stung and realized exactly what was happening to poor Donna. I had run screaming into the house through the back door terrorized and in pain very similar to Donna's reaction. She was probably stung more severely than I, because the bees were entangled in her hair so badly that her mother had to cut her long hair to remove them.
Donna and I will always remember "the day of the bumblebees" even though it happened over sixty years ago. It was another day in our experience of growing up in Sullivan.
Jerry L. Ginther
Copyright © 2002 - 2016 Jerry Ginther, All rights reserved worldwide
