Kudzu Monsters - Eunice and Toonis, Martin "Tater" Boring [that summer book .txt] 📗

. . . . . . Kudzu Monsters . . . . . .

If you have ever tried to raise a Building in the South, whether it be a house, a barn, an office building or even a shed over your lawn mower and you forget to check with the county first ….. Then you will learn a thing or two about ordinances....
It Will usually start in the morning when you will find a notice on your fence to stop building … that there may be a violation of code 1124 – C, Section 4, paragraph 7, volume VIII of the county Ordinances and By Laws ….  Hopefully you have had your coffee first cause you are in for One big Headache! ….
Now apparently one of the BIG No No’s of these ordinances is that you are not allowed to build said property on said land without one of those plastic little fences that surrounds the property…. This they say is to control erosion….. This always seemed kinda foolhardy to me cause I can tell ya … If you’ve ever seen a house slide down a mountain … One thing you will know for sure is that no little plastic fence is gonna be able to Stop it! …. I’m sure whoever came up with that little rule had at least one relative who owned a hardware store that sold plastic fence material no Doubt!……
I don’t know who’s idea it was in Georgia that we needed to battle erosion in the first place… but its as if someone had told them that the state of Louseyana used to be a great mountain range until the rains beat them down into the flatlands that they are today …
If you are not familiar with Lousiana …. It has been noted ...  that it is a place where a man can sit and watch his dog run away for three days! ….
Before the little pastic… fence somebody got the bright idea that we should go to Japan and bring in a little plant called Pueraria lobata … more commonly called Kudzu … they said it would help our erosion problem …. now I’m sure If somebody had the power to go back and rethink this idea they would keep in mind that this is the same country that gave us chopsticks, sushi, and Godzilla ….
Thats right they tried to tell us that eating raw fish is Yummy! (gross!!!) ...  and if we had incorporated their eating utensils of chopsticks … we’d all been starved to death by now! ... Notice ya never see any fat Japanese people and If ya Have its only because they Cheated and used Forks!
If ya ask me …. instead of Kudzu … I think they should have called it Godzilla vine … seeing how it Is The Plant that Ate the South! …. In some of the really Old Godzilla movies you can actually see a kudzu vine growing right up his back! ….
Coincidence? … I think Not!

In the history of the world there has only been two instances of a country dropping a nuclear weapon on another country …. I have since began to wonder If we dropped those bombs on Japan in retaliation of them trying to destroy us with this Vegetarian version of “The Blob” … or If they had gotten wind of our nuclear program and tried to curtail it with Kudzu …. But it Does occur to me …. That these are Two Countries that do Not need to be exchanging Ideas!

If you ever get a chance to travel down the road where we grew up... you will find that Kudzu has run amok in our area … especially in places that are still heavily wooded along the roadside. … which would describe about half of Collard Valley Road.
Our house was right about in the middle of that area … down low in the valley …. And One thing I hated was to get caught too far away from home when the sun started goin down … One thing I wanted to be was close to home!... Before the the wild cats, the bears and the toast eating Indians came out after dark….
Now you have to remember back in those days we did not have a television … most of our news came by way of the radio where we all would huddle around and listen to at night right before bedtime .
Eunice (or Granny as We all call her) always loved to recount the story about the Night they aired “ The War of the Worlds” by H.G Wells … it was a science fiction story about Martians invading the earth …… several of the men had mistook it to be a real event and took up arms forming the Collard Valley Militia that night including Toonis :p … “Thank the Lord for Ole Toonis…. Savin Us from dem there Martians that night!” … she would always say with a belly laugh. :p
The majority of our stories came from either the books at school, (but lets face it … how many of us mountain kids ever read many of those) … or stories that the Older folks would sit and tell… and believe me! My Uncle Toonis was full of them :-s … He always had some story or another about facing down a Bear or a Wildcat with only one bullet left while on one of his huntin trips ….. One time he hit a Wildcat right between the eyes but as luck would have it, .. just as he was about to retrieve it a bear came out of nowhere and ran off with it….. it seems that something always happened to whatever he had happened to hit, maim or kill on one of his adventures. Funny I Don't recall ever seeing anything he had shot on one of his hunting trips and he Always came back smelling like a Brewery. :-s
  He also loved to scare us with stories about Indians and how they would sneak up on the house after dark …. To prove this he sat a piece of toast on a window sill one night and sure enough the next morning it had disappeared ….. Now I imagine that IF there had been such a thing as a C.S.I. team back then … They would have quickly surmised that the crumbs from that bread had fallen inside of the house and a swab of DNA saliva from the window sill probably would have proven that “Old Bo” .... Toonis’s favorite hound dog was actually the guilty culprit … But to a seven year old child with very little worldly experience … it was ALL the proof that was needed ….
I won’t forget One night I heard some rambling in the Kitchen and I’ll be dog the next day when I checked … one of em had gotten into the Nanner Pudding!

You can say one thing for us mountain kids we sure had some vivid imaginations. I can remember layin back on a hill one day watching clouds go by. I was telling Addie Lou that I see a poodle and she came back with …. That she sees Little Red Riding Hood … “for Real”? … how the heck can you see red in puffy white clouds? …. Anyway that was a daytime thing … at Night it was a whole nother story
I won’t forget the first time we ventured too far from the house …. We had decided we was gonna go see what was on the other side of the main road … it was a good four mile walk and when we got there … we learnt it was pretty much the same … we were about halfway back when all of a sudden we could see it was gonna get dark before we could make it home …. “Oh Lord” …. We were still up in the wooded area …. We kept to the middle of the road …. Just knowing an Alligator would come running out of the Kudzu any time now (why we thought gators lived around there is beyond me) …. Plus there was No telling what was already buried in those kudzu patches … we had seen houses, barns, cars and even heard about a Bus full of kids that had been eaten by that carnivorous plant … I dittin doubt Miss Millie was out there somewhere (see the Baez story) ….

I'll Never forget when we came around the Bend and the first time I saw One …. A Kudzu Monster! … I grabbed Addie’s hand and pulled her back … I dittin want to go Any further ….. now what was really a tree that was overgrowed with Kudzu had taken a shape to me much like those puffy clouds do in the daytime …. Only These were No Puffy little Clouds …. These were GINORMOUS Creatures that were Dark and ominous and definitely too close to the Ground! … the first One I saw took the shape of King Kong or a Giant Gorilla standing at Least a hundred feet tall! …. He was sittin on a hill about 50 yards off the right side of the road … it looked like he could have easily taken one swipe of his huge mighty fist and pounded us into the ground …. I clinched my eyes shut tight while Addie pulled us into a forward direction against my will …. We did get to the left side of the road … willing to take our chances with the alligators rather than getting squashed by Kong….

We had gotten around the great Ape and started down an incline when I heard Addie gasp …. That was a Not a good sign cause Addie was Much braver than I was at the time …. I opened my eyes and There he was ….. GODZILLA! …. Oh my god it was the King of All Monsters … His mouth was wide open as If he was about to breathe fire and scorch us right off of that dirt road … he was on the opposite side of the road from King Kong so naturally we moved to the right of the road ….

I was Really hatin the Japanese AND their Kudzu Now! …. I had my arms wrapped around Addie’s neck and shoulders with my face buried in her back … she kept shushing me to “keep quiet” don’t let him hear you!” as we tiptoed on by him at a snails pace.
Finally we got ahead of him and started getting to where we could see some fields … everything was getting a little more out in the open and I took off leaving Addie behind … making a beeline back to the house … of course I had to get back to the house before the Indians could get me and If I kept Addie behind me they would get her first!
Now that I’m older and much wiser and I think back on these days of yesterday ….. I sure wish I could go back and only have little things to worry about Like King Kong, Godzilla, Alligators and Indians ….. I bet If I knew then what I know now … We would a come around that corner and seen OBAMA and HILLARY CLINTON … and Addie Lou and I would have been Doomed for sure! :-s