“Stop laughing and eat your lunch,” ordered my mother.
We — my older sister and myself — were at the kitchen table in the summer cottage. As usual, I was picking at my food, eating slowly, while Sister had finished long before and was now making the funniest faces at me across the table to give me the giggles, distract me from eating, and get Mum mad… at me!
It was sibling victimization at its best.
This was eighty years ago. The cottage had no electricity; water was pumped by hand from the lake; and refrigeration was by blocks of ice from an ice-house. Dad was in Ottawa with the Navy in the middle of World War II. Mum was on her own with we kids and her own mother under less-than-ideal circumstances.
Understandably, her patience could be short.
“I mean it,” she emphasized. “I have too much to do here than wait for you slow-poke to finish eating so I can clean up. Now pick up that fork and get at it.”
I obeyed. But that was the signal for Sister to put on another comical face and set me giggling again.
“That’s it!” declared Mum, and she poured a glass of cold water from a pitcher in the icebox. “Either you stop laughing right now or you will be wearing this water.”
I was working on a mouthful of lunch when Sister went behind Mum and made more faces at me. The food flew out of my mouth, Mum’s hand with the glass rose above me, and cold water cascaded over my head and down my torso.
There was a moment of shocked silence. Then Sister whooped with glee. I began giggling again, this time through cold drips from my hair. And Mum had to turn away so we wouldn’t see her losing it too. But we did anyway, and the incident ended with mutual hilarity.
I got my retribution a few weeks later as we began the long car ride home from the cottage.
There was no Highway 400 back then. Our route meandered through hamlets, villages and towns mostly over roughly paved roads in hard-sprung cars of those days. In front of a small white schoolhouse in Port Severn was an abrupt rise in the road that caused young stomachs to take a quick turn. We kids would urge the driver to “take it fast” for maximum effect.
Sister and I had caught some tadpoles in the frog pond near the cottage and kept them in an open-topped aquarium so we could watch the little wrigglers morph into frogs at home. Where do you put such a container so it won’t easily spill in a car on a long road trip? Not much choice: on the shelf under the back window.
So, with we kids in the back seat and Mum driving, we came into Port Severn and the entreaties to take-it-fast arose. As our tummies flipped, there erupted a splashing noise and a loud shriek. I looked at Sister. Her horrified face was running with water, seaweed, and wriggly tadpoles.
As Mum pulled the car to the roadside, I started laughing helplessly, then Mum did, and eventually Sister did too, once we had picked the wrigglers out of her blonde braids.
Ah yes. Revenge can indeed be sweet.
