one smart girl and one cracked egg

As Ben likes to say, it’s been hotter than Grandma Jean’s final resting place around here. When I asked Aunt Kitty what that means, she just said Ben wasn’t too fond of his Grandma Jean, ’specially after she sneaked a whoopie cushion onto his dinner chair the night he finally convinced Lily Hawkins to come for dinner. Apparently Lily Hawkins had hair fine and yellow as cornsilk, and as such could not be expected to tolerate a boy with poor table manners.

On account of the heat though, Aunt Kitty cut short my lessons this morning. Doing math is fine, she said, and sweating is fine too, but doin’ them both together is just plain torture. She packed up my wanderin’ sack and shooed me out the door.

“Keep an eye out for rattlers,” she said, and I was on my own.

Now, I like to think of myself as pretty intelligent–smarter than the average 12-year-old girl, I mean. Least-wise Aunt Kitty’s always telling me I talk like a foreigner or someone twice my age on account of all the books I’m always reading, and sometimes she threatens to pack the books away for a while. I’m afraid no one will think I’m smart when I come to the end of this tale though. I can hardly explain to myself how I wound up at the top of that old Digger pine, bawling my eyes out over a broken egg.

First thing I did when Aunt Kitty shut the door behind me was whistle for Pilot. He came running quick enough, but when he saw that wanderin’ sack over my shoulder he knew we were going for a ramble and just like that he was off. I tried to keep up with him, but pretty soon I had to stop and pull the foxtails out of my shoes and when I looked up again, he was long gone.

That’s about when the hawk cried out, and it’s also about when I saw the egg laying on the ground at the base of that big Digger pine. I looked at that egg, and I looked at that hawk and I put two and two together. Or I guess I put one and one together. Well if I wanted to be doing math, I’da been back in the kitchen with Aunt Kitty. In any case, I searched the branches of that tree and sure enough, away up at the top, there was a big nest. That hawk let out another cry and there was just no help for it. I knew what I had to do. I put aside my stick, tucked that egg into my pocket, hitched up my pants and started climbing.

I got real high real fast. I’m a pretty good climber, on account of all the times Pilot’s chased neighbor cats up into trees and I had to rescue them to keep Pilot out of trouble. So I was real close to getting that egg back in the nest when I felt something shift in my pants and I looked down just in time to see that egg fall down, down, down until it landed with a thud and a crunch right back in that spot I first found it.

So that’s how I wound up near the top of that Digger pine, bawling my eyes out over a baby hawk that would never see the light of day. Now if you’re a tree climber you might know that getting up a tree is a darn sight easier than getting back down.