Fun in the dark

I guess I was no more than eight years old when I did something that turned out much funnier than I ever could have imagined. Let me start at the beginning.

We moved to the Old Holland Place on Route 4, Elba, AL, when I was four or five years old. It wasn't near as nice as the government house where I was born, but I liked it. Mama tells me that as we walked through the house for the first time that I said, "Oh Mama, we've got baby mice." She wasn't excited in the least about my discovery. "Baby mice my foot," she said, "that's nothing to be proud of."

That reminds me of a time when our daughter and her husband and daughter were visiting us many years later. We saw a mouse in our den and closed up everything so it could not escape and preceded to kill it. Little Ambrianna was sitting in the swing in our den beside her daddy. She asked, "Why do they want to kill Stewart Wittle?"

Back to the Holland Place. The house was old and unpainted. From the porch that went all the way across the front of the house, on the right side you entered a large room with an oil heater. Mama and Daddy divided the room up into a living area where we sat around the heater. Right behind that was a full size bed on either side of the room. At the end of the beds we walked through to the dining area, which also had a door to the front porch. The kitchen was behind the dining area and then you turned right into a small hall and onto the bedroom where my two brothers slept. That was the extent of the house except from the small back hall, there was a back door with an uncovered porch. It had a shelf with running water out there. The house was basically square with four rooms and a closet opposite the back door. That's where we kept our chamber at night and pretended the room was our indoor bathroom. It had a curtain for a door. We also had a nice outdoor toilet. Daddy always saw that our toilets were as nice as could be built.

One night mother and daddy were in their bed at the back of the living room and my bed was right across from them. We had cotton mattresses and I took my left hand and found a slit in the material. Reaching in gently I pulled out a hand full of cotton and began rolling it up in an oblong fashion. I put it in my right hand, pulled my hand back over my head and sailed it across the room in the stillness of the night. Believe me, I wasn't ready for what I heard!

"Grady, get up," Mama yelled, " A rat has fallen out of the ceiling and landed on my stomach!!!"

I started giggling, and Mama caught on.

"Glenda, you'd better not pull the cotton out of the mattress. We need to take care of what we have." I don't recall what else she said, but I have laughed lots of times about that through the years.

Another thing I recall about my brothers sleeping in the bedroom is that they slept together on a full size bed. There was no heat in the room and they slept under a load of quilts so heavy that once they got in bed, they could hardly turn over. I remember one was made out of brown velvet patches.