Oh to be a kid again!!!!! I have given you a very brief description of life during ginning season. How we played in the cotton wagons, either empty or full... how I would take the cotton samples to my Mother as the scale house... how I drove "Old Blue" into the HUGE Cherry Tree in the front yard only to have my butt hurt much worse than the tree could ever be hurt or the truck for that matter. How Daddy would open the store early, wait for the employees to come in and off to the shoe factory he would go...... Ginning season would usually end sometime in November. So from November to March, it was pretty much free reign around home. Mother was back working in the store, Mamaw and Papaw were vacationing in the mountains, which was always Mamaw's idea to go... or just doing whatever life threw at them. Papaw usually hung around the store.. making sure Mother had everything she needed... he was a jewel of a man.... there aren't many men like Papaw and Daddy that exist in today's world. I had an older brother, Kim, who was 9 years older than me and 12 years older than my younger brother, Chris. He was our babysitter as we got older... until he went off to college. It was December... a cold, cold, cold Saturday morning... one of the coldest winters I can remember in Tennessee. My Mother had put a load of cloths in to wash before she left for the store and had given Kim instructions to have them dried and folded before she got back home for lunch. Chris and I were sitting in the living room watching cartoons... on one of the 3 channels we could get when Kim hollers for me to come help him. So, I get up, go into the kitchen where the washing machine was and he says "Hold your arms out, I'll lay the cloths, which were towels, across your arms and you can put them in the dryer." Being 7 years old, I thought.. ok.. no problem.. I can handle this. So, he lays the towels across my arms and when he's finished, he follows me on the back porch, where the dryer is, opens the dryer door and tells me to put in the towels. I bent over to put the towels in the dryer ... WELL....... not ONLY did the towels go in the dryer... SO DID I!!!!!!!!! Yes, you read it right... I went into the dryer with the towels... screaming my head off every inch of the way. Now Chris, being the baby of the family, was so involved in the cartoons that he just totally tuned it out. I cried, screamed and kicked and god knows what else... Kim almost got the dryer door closed... almost... but didn't quiet make it...... FINALLY.... Chris comes out on the back porch and ask me what's wrong... I told him that Kim almost put me in the dryer... Kim and Chris laughed, laughed and laughed... and I CRIED, CRIED and CRIED!!!! Mother came home a few hours later.... I TOLD HER! Ummmmmmm.... Kim didn't try to put me in the dryer again!!!! But I wasn't the only one terrorized. I was also the terrorizee(I don't think that's a word, but oh well... anyway... HOLLYWOOD - HERE WE COME ...... hehehehehehehehehe - bwhahahahahahahahaha - ;-) So, I told you how my older brother put me in the dryer and how Chris just laughed and laughed. Well.... I knew that sometime in the not to far distant future, I would get him back. And that's exactly what I did.... with a little help from Kim. I was about 7 at the time, so that made Chris 4... Chris is the baby of the family. I was 3 -4 years old when Mother and Daddy adopted him. Now don't get me wrong, I love my little brother but that's just it... he was my "LITTLE BROTHER." I wanted a little sister... but no....... I got a stinky little brother who would give me coodies.... Chris had the most beautiful head of hair ever to have been given to a male. It was so soft and naturally curly... he was too pretty to be a boy..... He should have been a girl.... and we would always tease him about how pretty he was... we went so far as to call him "Christy Love". Now Christy Love was a show in 1974 about a black policewoman. We loved watching that show. That's where we came up with the nickname for our little brother. I had the most brillant idea ever.... well... not exactly me, but Kim and me did.... we put our heads together and plotted the tortue for Chris. Now when I say "tortue", I don't mean any physical tortue... I'll let you be the judge...... One day, while Kim was babysitting us, we told Chris that a big movie producer was coming to Milledgeville to cast parts for "Get Christy Love". To our surprise... HE BELIEVED US!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOO At last, I was going to get my revenge... So, he let us curl his hair, put makeup on him, paint his nails, put on one of my girlie girl dresses and a pair of Mother's high heels. Let me tell you, he thought he was SOMETHING HOT! He would prance around the living room say "Your under arrest, Sugah!" all the time pretending to slap the cuffs on one of my baby dolls. We laughed till we hurt. Oh god how we laughed. This went on for a couple of hours... then Mother came home for lunch. We thought that we were in big trouble... but all she did was make up clean him up.... She didn't show it, but I know she was laughing too. But that wasn't then end of it......... not by far......Oh no... I wasn't finished just yet..... After Mother went back to the store, Kim and I once again pulled out our mischevious hats... this time we told him that instead of the producer for "Get Christy Love", it was a producer that was going to make an Aunt Jemima commercial. Poor little fellow believed us on this one too. And we were off...... I went and found a bandana. We tied his head up in the bandana, put tan makeup on his face, with red dots, put him on an old shirt of Daddy's that came down to his knees and one of Mother's aprons. Handed him a broom - and SNAP.... yep, we took a picture.... oh how we were laughing..... the kid finally wised up and he figured out that there was NOT any type of movie producers coming to Milledgeville. That we had lied to him all day long. Oh how he cried and cried and cried.... Oh how sweet it was!!!!!!!! He called Mother at the store.... she came home.............. WE WERE IN T.R.O.U.B.L.E.! We still to this day have the Aunt Jemima picture of Chris with the biggest grin I have ever seen on a child. See life was always simple when we were kids. Why can't life be simple like this again? I look at my own kids and wonder if they too will have stories to tell when then get older. Stories that they will be able to tell their kids.... Stories of how they tortued each other... stories like we have? Will they, I don't know.. but somehow I wish that I could take my kids and go back in the past to when I grew up and show them how simple it all was and how we had so much fun. Even though Kim is not with us anymore, Chris and I still find the time to laugh at the same old stuff every time we are together. Of course, Mother remembers everything oh so well. SMOOCHES!