I just filled our clothes dryer with yet another load of damp laundry. It reminded me of a time when we had no dryer and our formerly nasty clothes hung in the backyard on a clothesline for everyone to ogle. My dad had a pair of argyle socks that were so badly stretched and so thoroughly worn they licked the ground when hung on the line. Today, people would be in shock to see the things our parents routinely hung in public. I remember the neighbor had a pair of massive underpants with little cats printed diametrically all over them. She hung them out twice a week. My dog, Bo Bo barked at those drawers like a boatless sail flapping in the Alabama breeze. We could have used the undergarment for a pup tent.
Our clothesline was strung between two T-shaped metal pipes, welded into a cross and strung with clothesline wire. I call it that because I never saw it used for anything but clotheslines. In the summer, wasps built nests inside the top T pipes. Big nests.
I have been bitten and stung by things that fly, crawl, swim and burrow, but the day I decided to ride the clothesline ranks as the penultimate stinging of my short clothesline-riding career.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, like so many things that lead to pain often do. I don’t recall much before I saddled the T-pipe. I was wearing a cowboy hat and brandishing a fake .45 from Woolsworth, I remember that much. After shimmying up the pole and slinging my leg over the top, I went to town on that thing like it was Trigger. The clothesline whipped and bowed, reminiscent of the famous bridge (somewhere in the northwest) coming apart on numerous disaster shows. It didn’t take long to get the wasps attention.
They came from both ends and they were under no illusion as to who was shaking their abode. They attacked from every angle. I was slinging and slapping. I remember an old man driving by, mouth agape, looking at me rodeoing that clothesline amidst the flock of agitated Vespidae. One big wasp was humping my arm like a dog on a pillow. One pulled my lip back to allow two others to sting me inside my mouth and another rode my tongue like a little winged bull, which can happen when you are screaming like a Munch painting. At some point, I fell off the pole. The whump of hitting the ground crushed a hundred wasps and made three hundred more even madder. My cowboy hat was no protection. The fake gun just pissed them off even worse. Move dove in. A group working as a team tried to yank off my pants and one, I swear, pulled my sock down and busted his pointed little ass to get into my shoe. It had to be near a record for wasp damage. I swelled up like a frog and ran, trailing a buzzing fog of twisted whistlers.
The finally tally? 32 whelps. I was lucky. At least 2,000 yellowjackets took turns trying to prove their point. Today, professionals would have declared me dead and just hauled me off to the funeral home. But I was no virgin to wasps, having been stung every day of my childhood, so my tolerance was nearly as intense as their predatory attitude. I looked like an angry carpenter had taken a ball peen hammer to me – a visual map of the yellowjackets’ social skills. Doctors could have used my blood for anti-venom. But we never went to the doctor then unless we were hit by a bus. A friend of mine was (hit by a bus) – cracked his head like a watermelon – so he did go to the doctor. Since busses are bigger than wasps, my mom just rubbed snuff all over me. It was the nasty stuff, snuff like my grandmother dipped all day long. Such powdered tobacco was the treatment for wasp stings – wet, gooey, smelly snuff. It worked, though. Mom used it on me all the time, cans of it. I smelled like Philip Morris himself for a week. But I learned.
I never used the clothesline for a horse again. The doghouse worked much better anyway. While Bo Bo barked at the giant cat panties flapping in the wind next door, I shot the bad guys, the wasps stayed in the clothesline pipes, and everyone got along just fine. Sales of snuff, however, surely suffered.
Tags: Alabama, Personal Stories, South