Finding 35

13. Blueberry Grunt

Growing up in the county wasn’t exactly the country, and it wasn’t really the city, but it was more like the city than the country when you compared it to Bridgewater Nova Scotia.  Bridgewater is located about 75 minutes south of Halifax, and when we were young, it felt like it took 3 hours to get there.  We drove our white Peugeot with my parents in the front and my sisters and I in the back.  As I was the smallest, I always sat on the hump in the back seat, in the middle, where you don’t get your own space.  Nothing to lean on, no window to stick your arm out of, but you are always in the middle of the action.  And sometimes that is not a good thing.  I vividly remember the burning tan vinyl that got so incredibly hot when it was baked in the summer sun.  Of course our car had no air conditioning back then.  It was around 1977!  Air conditioning was a luxury!  Instead you jostled around sitting on your hands trying to protect your legs from burning up on the bloody hot vinyl (bloody-hell was one of my father’s curse words), and once your hands got too hot, you squirmed around on your bum and tried to make your shorts cover all of your legs.  Eventually this would work, and the effect of the movement of the car speeding along the old country two lanes roads with the AM radio blaring made for a truly great family experience and with all of the windows down would make for a nice cool breeze.  Except for this one time…

It all happened so fast.  Our family driving in the country, the sun beating down with the occasional cloud in the sky, quickly turned to frantic panic when a 7 year old started squirming between his two older sisters in the back seat of the breezy white car traveling at 65 mph on an old windy road.  With rush of the wind noise from all the windows bring down, and the static noise from the radio, I started squirming in my confined middle humped seat buckled in and reaching for my back.  I must have started scratching or something, and my sisters thought I had an itchy back, so they started helping out.  Scratching my back from both sides, with four or five hands making a whole lot of commotion on my small back, I let out a yell.  As my father was driving, my mother turned around trying to find out what was wrong.  So there were more arms and hands getting in my face, and all I wanted was to get my t-shirt off.  Then ZAP!  And then another one, PZZZT!  And again, STING!  I must have yelped like crazy!  My father has no idea why I’m screaming behind him in the little white French made car, so he pulls off the road and stops the car.   My sisters open their doors and I fly out of the car faster than a bee to honey. 

Except in this case I was the honey.

I have a grudge against buzzing things now.  A huge bumblebee had been sucked into our open windows.  That bumblebee was probably just looking for some more pollen.  Slowly hovering around the side of the road and it saw some better flowers on the other side.  Why did the bumblebee cross the road? 

We’ll never know because it went down the back of my t-shirt.  The fluttering I felt were its wings against my back.  And I don’t think it was very happy that my sisters got involved in scratching my back, and it was at that time it started to make itself known.  Then I let everyone else know with my screaming.

It stung me three times, who knew a friggin’ bumblebee could sting more than once?!  So that experience combined with me walking on a few lazy low flying bees in our backyard and being stung in the foot has left me with a bit of a buzzing phobia.  Stupid bumblebees and wasps.  Oh how I hate wasps.  The world would be a better place without wasps.  At least bees make honey!  Wasps only make trouble.

Back to the story of going to Bridgewater where my uncle Mike lives.  Uncle Mike was my mom’s brother, and he always liked being called ‘Uncle Mike’, and his wife, Rosie, ‘Aunt Rosie’.  They have four kids, who were pretty much the closest cousins we had, as we were all very close in age–Monica was a year older than me, Chris a year younger than me, Rene a year younger still, and Mandi–a year or two younger than Rene.  They lived in this country house in the Centre.  Yup, the town was called Centre; there was an upper Centre and a lower Centre.  But they lived in Centre.