by David Shriver

Created on: November 28, 2010   Last Updated: November 30, 2010

You see our family was a very close family where my aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents would all get together on a regular basis. In the summertime these get together if at my uncle Russ's involve homemade ice cream, and if at our house you could count on watermelon. My Dads side of the family consisted of Grandpa and grandma, one uncle, and three aunts. We farmed with my uncle in partnerships, one aunt lived in Massachusetts, one about one hundred miles away and the other in the neighboring town where her husband owned a lumber company. My dad always liked to take everyone down into the river bottoms to show the crops to everyone, so he bought an old retired school bus, took most of the seats out so he could haul fuel in the back, but left a few rows of seats for out crop tours. Usually on a Sunday afternoon, after Sunday Dinner and Watermelon we would climb into the old Reo School bus and go for a tour of the crops.

We went to church one Sunday morning in August, close to my birthday, had a couple watermelons in the old milk cooler, and company coming for dinner. We got home from church, and my aunt and uncle from town came out my uncle Russ, and Grandpa and Grandma and all my cousins all over for fried chicken and Watermelon. That afternoon before everyone went home my Dad brought the old school bus around we all climbed in and went down into the river bottom to look at how well the crops looked. On the way back I was sitting next to my Dad and as we were almost to our house my dad saw the cause of a faint odor we had been putting up with all day, a dead skunk laying next to the road. My Dad told me that when we got home I should come back and get rid of it.

I had watched my dad on numerous occasions get rid of things like that, so I just followed in his footsteps. Sometime in the past I had been with my Dad in the old Reo School bus on a fuel run down into the bottoms and there would be road kill of one persuasion or another ,and my Dad would take a piece of baling twine, make a loop and loop it around the dead critters foot. He would then tie the baling twine on the back bumper of the old Reo School bus and when we got down to the fields in the bottoms, after about six miles of gravel road, the critter would mysteriously be gone.

I went over to the barn and got a piece of baling twine, by that time it was getting dark, I made my way to where the stinking skunk was and looped a loop around one of its legs. The school bus was sitting in the barnyard –no- that won't work.

That night my Dad got a call from my uncle thanking him for the present, It seems that when I tied it to the back bumper of their car, it turned out to be a pretty tough ole skunk, cause it was still there when they pulled into their garage.

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