Memories

I love reading blogs. It's fun to get to peek into other people's lives.  It feels like having permission to be a fly on their wall .   Everytime I read a post, it makes me think of something I want to say.  You know...more than a comment.  Maybe I've lived so long that everything in every place reminds me of a moment.  Kelly, of Kelly's Thoughts & Ramblings, often does that to me.  Today I read a post of hers with a picture of a scorpion.  They always give me the heebie jeebies.  And there went my mind into memories of long ago.  My first encounter with one of the boogers was when I was 16.  We had just moved into a new house.  On the first night in my new bedroom when I climbed between my sheets, I thought I had been stabbed by a needle.  I jumped up, turned on the light, threw back the covers...and screamed.  My mother came running, and tried to calm hysterical me.  It wasn't working.  In  her wisdom, which rarely failed,  she got out the World Book so that we could read about scorpions.  I never thought to ask her, but I assume she was looking for something to show me that people do not die from scopion stings.  She read, I sobbed.  I was SUCH a hypochondriac.  I'll never forget the last sentence:  "Scorpion stings are rarely deadly."   That obviously meant that some of the time, some people died.  My mother stayed up the rest of the night with me.  I didn't want to be alone in case I died. 

My next visit from a scorpion was 8 years later when I was the mother of an infant.  I stepped on one that time.  It stung me, and I had another crying fit, but no mother to comfort me. My "then" husband probably had his head in a Greek book.  I don't remember that he gave me any comfort.   Sometime during those 8 years, I had read that bleach applied to a scorpion sting helps greatly.  I splashed bleach all over myself and the floor, hopping on one foot and screaming.  The pain went away quickly.  My next memory is of drying off the bleach, and rocking my little baby girl.  Someone was already more important to me than myself.