One weekend I had the house all to myself. Mamaw and Double Mamaw was visiting an old friend who was dying in the hospital in Meridian. They took Shady with them because he was too little to stay with me. Somebody had to feed and water the critters, and that task fell to me, because I do it anyway and I love the critters.

Uncle Muddy and Mr. Grover Sessuls went to a ham radio convention in Alabama. Both of these trips was on the same weekend, and Mamaw made arrangements for the church van to come pick me up and let me off on Sunday. I asked Mamaw could Tank, Jasper or even Stinky come over for awhile on Friday night. She said yes; as long as you young’uns don’t get into any trouble, and they help you feed the critters they can even make a pallet and stay the night!

So there we all were; Mamaw had left us plenty of food in the refrigerator, in the stove and wrapped up on the counter. There was no way we were going to starve, we could have feed double the amount of people with the sheer amount of food she had laid out for me to eat. We ate supper, and we told Tank he would have to make do with one chicken since Mamaw really didn’t make him any extra. But I got him some apples and cheese to snack on after we all ate.

We were some kind of bored; Mamaw doesn’t let us watch TV and we don’t have that many channels out where we are anyway. Mamaw doesn’t allow cell phones in our house EVER, except for the one prepaid one with 100 minutes that is one of them flip jobs. We don’t have landlines and that is the only phone we have, and its just for emergencies. Jasper, Stinky and Tank all know not to use their cell phones here either, because somehow Mamaw WILL ask and she WILL find out.

We were sitting there playing Uno when suddenly I got the bright idea to go hiking. Now this is at night, its kind of cool outside and there was no moonlight of any kind. All we had was flashlights. I don’t know why, but I got the idea to tie 250 ft of monofilament fishing line to one of Mamaw’s old purses, and trick people by putting it in the road at the highway on the wooded end of our land.

How this works is this: you tie that fishing line to that old purse, and you make sure there are no cars that see you do this. You set it on the center line in the middle of the road, just so nobody runs over it, then you run and hide in the weeds and let that line out. Directly a car will come along and see it. You wait for the tail lights for when they decide to stop, then you reel it in really fast and retrieve it.

We call this “The Purse Trick” or “Fishing for Cars” and its some kind of funny to hear them people swearing they saw that purse. Like “I swear Martha I saw it right there on the center line. It was there, I am sure of it.” You can’t laugh though, and let on like you are the one doing it, or the people might hear.

We had been doing that for an hour, and another car came along. We saw the tailights and reeled it in, but just then the whole night lit up with blue lights. Cops! Oh man we caught a State Trooper. We knew it was a State Trooper, because they ain’t but one car that lights up the night like that. He was onto us too; somebody must have called him after they figured out what we were up to.

He started shining the light in the woods and man we were some kind of scared. We dove flat on the ground, right in the stickers and weeds. He shined his big spotlight everywhere; and we didn’t make a peep or breathe a word. Tank was so scared he just froze. Me and Jasper and Stinky were trying hard not to talk or whisper, and that State Trooper just kept shining that light. We could hear his radio crackling, and directly he got on the PA of his car and said, “I know someone is there. Do not let me catch you doing this again, or you will spend time in jail tonight!”

We all froze when he said that, but he got back in his cop car, turned the blue lights off and drove on. That was the scaredest ten minutes of my entire life, and right after he drove off, we waited in case he was tricking us, trying to catch us running. We waited another ten minutes, and walked as slow as we could manage the fifteen minutes or so back to the house. When we got back we made each other swear nobody would ever tell on one another.

We managed to get our breath enough to start playing Uno again. That ended that nonsense, and the boys went home early the next morning, after helping me with my chores. I didn’t have to lie to Mamaw, because we were all good besides that, and I tried hard to put my best ‘not guilty’ face on. I don’t think I will be doing that ever again.