Chapter 52
In spite of the fiercity of summer’s wrath there are symptoms that we WILL have fall this year. Everybody knows there is NO way summer and fall can live in harmony together. They just were not meant for the ’til death do us part kind of relationship.
Summer lived fiercely and made the pages of the history books for its length of days and intensity of heat. But the ornery old cuss appears to have a hard time acceptin’ its fate. We’ve still had record breaking WARM days for November.
Even though it is trying hard not to fade away, fall is beginning to take over.
The trees are beginning to shed their lovely colored leaves.
And children can be seen all over town gathering leaves into big piles so they can RUN and jump in the middle of them.
Try to get those same children to rake the lawn, stuff the leaves into garbage bags, and carry it to the back of a pickup truck—immediate lack of energy attacks them and they are able to do nothing.
It always amazes me that these are the same children who have a million dollars’ worth of mechanical toys in their rooms: dolls that cry real tears, eat real food and crawl across the floor; electronic football games which let the child be a state champion EVERY time he plays; and you name it, they’ve got it.
But yet where do you find them in the fall—that’s right, out in the middle of a pile of leaves and giggling as they attempt to completely bury all three of them in a pile of dead leaves.
I’ve been noticing a lot of sniffles and coughing with these cold nights and warm days. Our poor old bodies don’t know whether to get prepared to be cold or hot so our tonsils rebel and create havoc.
Mine have been up to their war games again this year. They fire germ packed grenades at each other not realizing that germ warfare is not the proper thing to do in today’s civilized world.
I’ve put off doing anything really drastic about the critters, hoping that they could
come to some kind of agreement between the two of them. But after making my stomach mad at me for eating two pounds of menthol eucalyptus and accomplishing nothing, I guess the time has come for some definite action.
As bad as I hate the thoughts of it, the time has come to pour out a few ounces of apple cider vinegar and get the rest of my being conditioned to the thoughts of gargling with it.
I KNOW the shivers are going to shake my toenails loose when I finally get the will power to make myself put it in my mouth.
I KNOW I’ll swear the hurt isn’t as bad as the cure!
! But this defiance must not be permitted to go on!
! And no self-respecting germ would try to survive a bath in that stuff.
Besides, I don’t like being sick while the kids have ALL the fun in the mountains of leaves…