Happy Mother’s Day

When I was about 7 or 8, I remember playing outside in our family’s driveway, right after a rain storm. It had rained buckets, and when that happened in Massachusetts, hundreds of earthworms would be forced out of the ground, onto the sidewalks and grass.

It looked kind of like this, but with many more worms.

To most people, this would be like some kind of horror movie, but I was NOT a girly girl. If there were worms, turtles, toads, or mud, I wanted to play with them; in fact, I LOVED finding the biggest, most gooey worms and just yanking them the rest of the way out of the holes. You would step on them and they would squish in half and still keep moving for a minute after sometimes and I thought that was just the funniest thing ever.

Anyway.

On this particular sunny day, with the ground still damp but the sun out, I decided I would play a prank on my Mom. My mother did not like dirt, mud, or crawly things when I was a child. Dirty things were a huge No-No in our house. Perhaps that was the draw of it for me. I always found ways to go romp in nature.

So my parents had this  white Oldsmobile, which I think was fairly new at the time, or even brand new. Just so happens, Mom had left the car unlocked (the town I grew up in was fairly safe and suburban). I thought it would be hilarious to scare her  by placing a few worms on the dashboard of her car. I imagined her starting the car up, noticing the worms wriggling around, screaming for a second, and then us all having a good laugh about it afterwards.  So I got a handful of 2 or 3 of them, and gently placed them right on the dashboard, just in front of the steering wheel.

Now, mind you, my young mind didn’t quite have the capacity to realize that

a) car dashboards can get extremely hot even when it’s not hot outside

and

b) the car may not be driven for a while

Whenever someone (either my mom or dad) finally got in to go somewhere, they were treated to a nice surprise of fried earthworms. Needless to say, humor was not found in the situation and I was in quite a bit of trouble, learned my lesson, and never played a joke on anyone again.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Sorry about that.

And if anyone else reading this is a Mom, happy day to you also! You’ve got a hard job and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!