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Welcome to another ‘Tickle-me-Thursday’ and here is part three of No School Summer. The author, Don Bowen, has graciously given his permission to share some of his humorous stories exclusively on the Examiner. After the story, there is a recipe for Fried Sweet Potatoes. Enjoy!
Pee Wee and I put our heads together and started talking about how we were going to have fun and just how we might upset Mother Nature.
The first thing we did when we got down the road was to shed our shoes. We needed to toughen up our feet for the summer. Our goal was to have our feet so tough that we could walk through a bed of sand spurs and not have the first sticker to get stuck in our foot.
Our mothers were unaware that we shed our shoes when we got together like that. We always went to the creek and sat on a bank dangling our feet in the cool, clear spring water. We would kick at the many tadpoles and minnows.
Now, those tadpoles held a certain fascination for me. It was hard to believe that those hideous, fish-looking things would turn into frogs. I wanted to see for myself if that really would happen.
So, I took a few of them home with me and put them in the rain barrel near the house. The water was so dark. I started feeling bad thinking those tadpoles would surely die in that dark water. So, I took them back out and hurried to the creek to release them back into their natural habitat.
One day, Pee Wee, Old Pete and I were on our way to stirring up more fun and adventure. After cooling our feet for a while and splashing around in the water, the three of us took off down a pig trail. It was not far from the road that went into Donaldsonville. Pee Wee and I were shooting our slingshots, just seeing how far they would shoot, and our practice shots started disturbing the birds and squirrels in the trees. The two of us were laughing and talking, when all of a sudden, we started hearing angry chattering and chirping from the squirrels and birds.
Up until that point, Old Pete had been just ambling along sniffing at different spots when some angry squirrels started scampering around right near him, chattering and carrying on. Well, that set Old Pete off to barking like crazy, and as hard as I tried, I could not get him to quit barking. I had been so busy with Old Pete, that I had not noticed that Pee Wee had stopped rigidly still in his tracks. When I did turn to look at him, he started shaking his arm and pointing to the woods.
With his eyes ready to pop out of his head, Pee Wee said, “Did you see what I just saw?...Did you see that?”
Recipe for Fried Sweet Potatoes (Don Bowen)
Wash and peel 3 or 4 sweet potatoes and slice into rounds about ¼ inch thick or to your preference. In a large skillet, cast iron works good, coat the bottom of it with a thin layer of olive oil, or vegetable oil and enough margarine or butter to sauté the sweet potato rounds. You have to stay right with this dish while it is cooking, to keep turning the potatoes so they won’t burn or become charred. Cook them on a high heat until the potatoes are about done, then turn the head down to very low and cover the skillet with a lid.
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