Summer Days and Time Outs

    Summer time used to be the greatest. We would lay on our backs in our yard and watch the clouds and pick out various shapes that we liked. On the warmest days Mom would let us drag her laundry tub out and fill it with water for water fights. We would climb our old crab apple tree and read books among it's branches. And there were many things we could do to help with the garden and canning.

    One day John and I  kept getting into spats all day. Finally Mom got two plastic clothespins and gave them to us telling us to squeeze the ends while she put a dab of jam on the other end and then told us to sit out in the yard and wait until a fly sits on the jam and then allow the clothespin to snap shut.

    We sat in the yard for a long time with our homemade "fly traps" but there were no flies interested. We finally gave up and went to play something else.

     It was several years before we realized it had only been a clever way to put us in time out!