Family Story

When my mom was little she lived in Georgia on a farm with her parents and her grandparents. They had all of the normal things like cows and chickens. She moved to Virginia when she was fairly young, around the age of seven. She went back to Georgia every summer to visit her grandmother, so even though she lived in the suburbs she knew all the things that country people know. My father however was born in New York, lived in Florida for a while, and then eventually moved to Reston, Virginia. Reston even in his day was a city, and did not have any cows or chickens. When my parents got married in 1985 they didn't have much money, so they took their honeymoon in North Carolina. However there was a problem, because at the time there were several deaths in the area due to a cereal killer. Since they were cutting the honeymoon short they decided to visit my great-grandmother in Georgia. My father was quite blown away by the cows and tortillas, and was having a good time. That night my mother asked him to go for a walk, and told him to watch out for the box turtles. As they walked along she noticed that he was jumping from side to side more often then was natural. She did not see why he was jumping over the box turtles instead of just walking around them. It turns out that my father did not know that box turtle is another way to say pile of cow dung. He thought there were actually a bunch of really big turtles in the field, and he was scared that they were going to bite him. My mother told my great grandmother and grandmother this when they got back to the house. The three of them laughed so hard that they nearly peed themselves. This white city boy thought there were dozens of huge turtles in the field that he had to watch out for.

My mother still laughs at this story twenty-three years later.