Beautyberry..Insect Repellent or Memory Trigger??

I was out back today trying to clean a bit of the yard.  It seems that the dead leaves are falling at a rapid rate and I will never stay ahead of these things.  Early in the morning, it was cool enough that I was not bothered by the mosquitoes but by mid-morning, they were terrible!  Without giving it a second thought, I reached over to grab a couple of American Beautyberry leaves to rub on my arms.  This does a great job at repelling most biting insects!  Of course, I smelled a tad strange after that but I suppose that I already reeked a bit from working so hard!  This action made me recall a time back on the farm when I was a youngster.

Pop had a good many chickens on the farm along with a variety of other animals.  After all..it was a farm!  Anyway, the chickens were kept in a large barn on the other side of a nice sized pond.  During the day, the chickens had free range of the area around their barn.  They could go right to the water's edge to drink and had all sorts of goodies to munch in the woods.  During the late summer, the Beautyberry would start to turn their lovely shades of violet and the chickens would go crazy!  You could see them jumping up to peck at the berries after the lower limbs were stripped.  I never knew chickens could jump so high!  I loved our chickens and was happy that Pop let my brother and me feed them each day.  To get to the barn, we had to cross a single plank wide "bridge" that Pop had made across the pond.  If it was a particular rainy season, the ends of the bridge would slope down into the water.  We would wade through several feet of the murky pond water to get up on that plank to cross.  Then wade through several more feet to get to dry ground.  This did not bother Jimmy nor me as we loved playing in the water!  Neither he nor I was in school yet so we were rather young to be trotting around but nonetheless, it was our chore and we enjoyed it.  We loved those chickens!  (Not to mention..we sort of felt "grown up" being able to cross the pond by ourselves!)

One day after a heavy rain, we waded through the pond, crossed the bridge, waded again to get to the barn.  There we fed our chickens and picked the eggs.  We had picked so many eggs that we filled two large buckets!  This was a lot for two small kids to tote without breaking but we managed to get them to the middle of the bridge.  Then..then we were terrified!  On the plank sloping down into the water was a huge moccasin!  It had evidently been washed from its hiding place and was seeking dryer ground.  Our first thought was to turn around and walk all away around the pond.  Bad idea!  On the other side of the bridge..the same thing!  Another large snake had perched itself on the other ramp.  We were trapped!  Two tykes trapped on a bridge about twenty feet long!  Trapped on a bridge that was nigh under water!  Not knowing what to do, we huddled in the middle of that plank for what seemed like hours!  Soon, other snakes were crawling up on the boards and we had no where to run!  What to do, what to do????  Jimmy, being the older by a year, was far the wiser!  He came up with a plan!  He was my hero!! We discussed the matter and decided that even though we were not supposed to break any of the eggs, we would throw them at the snakes!  Brilliant!  I sure was happy my big brother was with me!  He chunked the first egg at the large moccasin.  Nothing!  The snake did nothing!!!  He threw another..harder this time!  The egg bonked the snake right on the noggin!  Yep! That snake was not happy!  He slithered off into the water!  Uh, oh!  He was coming closer to us!! (Did I mention that the bridge was only about six inches above the high water?)  Not good!  Time for Plan B!  Yell!!!!  And yell, we did!  We screamed for Pop to come get the snakes!  Thank goodness Mom was out hanging clothes and heard our commotion!   She and Pop came running!  Pop shooed the snakes away and rescued his two chickens...errr..kids! And to think...we did not get a switchin' for breaking a dozen or so eggs!  After that episode, we took long sticks with us on our journey to the hen house!

It is funny how the Beautyberries jogged that memory!  I guess things are stowed in the backs of our brains and it takes some small trigger to make them come shooting to life again!  My work, today, was finished with a grin on my face!  Geez, how I love walking down memory lane!