The Only Spanking I Didn't Deserve

There has been a lot of traffic insinuating this story and thought it would be a good time to tell.  This is how I remember it and my sister can dispute this all she wants.  Cully and I are witnesses for what happened.

When I was growing up south of La Junta, in Higbee (Colorado), we pretty much had free rein to go anywhere we wanted to go (BB Gun Wars and Paintball)….which we did most of the time. Strange as it may seem, none of us knew how to swim.  So there were certain places we could not go, the Purgatory River being one of them.  That is strange in and of itself because I just don’t remember there being that much water in it most of the time.  When it flooded, it got pretty high, but on the norm it was pretty shallow where it went behind our house.  Needless to say, us boys went down there all the time.  Mom was always telling us to stay off the river.  I think the fact that she couldn’t swim either, scared her a lot when us boys were gallivanting around the country side.

But the focus of this story was a pond.  Not just any pond, but one that was less than 2 feet deep.  The bottom 12-14 inches being mud and the tip 6-8 inches being water.

We had this big camping trip planned and had our backpacks loaded were ready to head out, when the unthinkable happened.  Jereny started whining that she wanted to go and Mom forced us to take her.  Cully and I were “saddled” with her irritating little sister presence.  Man, what a bummer!  After much arguing (whining?) on our part about the merits, and demerits, of taking your sister on a camping trip we left with her.

Our “camping trip” really only consisted of two backpacks, 6-8 sandwiches and a canteen.  We obviously weren’t going very far and in fact did not get very far from the house. We were told not to go to the river.  Well we weren’t….wink, wink.  We had planned to cut across the pastures until we were out of site of the house and cross the river, climb the cap rock on the other side and look for arrowheads.  Sigh…the best laid plans.

We decided to stop for lunch at the pond, which was all of about half mile from the house.  Boy, we really covered some ground!  The stop was more a way for Cully and I to plan around Jereny.  Would she go along with our plan or would she rat us out?  During the discussions we were throwing rocks in the pond to see who could get the biggest splash (how much splash can you really get from 6 inches of water anyway?).  I think at one point Jereny got splashed a little.  To be honest, none of us really planned on getting in the water.  We started out just wading around the edges, Jereny just kept getting further and further out.  So technically, she was the first one in.  Of course we had a high old time, splashing around in the mud and water.  Mostly mud, the water just wasn’t that deep.  After a couple of hours we knew we had to get out to get dried off, so Mom couldn’t tell we had been in the pond.  I guess we thought she would never notice the smell of pond water.  At that point, things started going down hill…

Jereny took off for the house.  Boy, we knew we were in trouble if she got there before she was dry!  Just over the hill from the pond, Jereny had run into Mom.  She was coming to check on us (don’t know why she thought she had to check on us, we never got into any trouble).  Cully and I topped the hill just in time to hear Jereny say, “They throwed me in”!  WHAT, wait a minute….did she just say…..I think this scared Mom pretty bad, because she went to whupping on us!  All the time with us yelling, “No we didn’t, she’s lying”!  Seemed like the spanking went on forever, always seems that way to a 3^rd grader. 

Over time this has turned into kind of a family joke.  How us big bad boys, threw poor little innocent Jereny into the pond!   In fact, it took Jereny until she was 30+ to admit to Mom that she was the first one in the water!  Probably the only spanking I got that I didn’t deserve, but I do have to admit there are other things that I got away with that I didn’t get spanked for.  So I guess things evened out in the end.

After hearing my version of this story, I suspect Jereny will try to recant her confession.  But, it’s too late….the cat’s out of the bag! HA!