One of the people most responsible for my love of the outdoors is retiring this week, and that would be my mom! Amy, the boys and I are heading to Florida this morning to attend a surprise retirement party for her, so I will have to write this post quickly. However I did want to relate a short story that, while just one example, perfectly illustrates how hard she tried to make sure I had ample opportunities in the woods as a young man. And being a single mother, that was definitely not always easy!

Normally she would arrange for me to hunt with family friends, but we were just stopping to visit here for a day on our way home from a Christmas trip up north. I was about 13, and I only had one afternoon that I could hunt before we continued on back to Florida. I really wanted to hunt so I begged her to take me. And my Uncle J.O. (sr) said that I could sit in the oak tree stand in the back of Jenkins field on Cubbedge Hill if she would.

Well, our small hatchback car was loaded down with clothes and Christmas gifts, but she said as long as I didn’t kill anything, she would drop me off. I said no problem since I figured that it was 50/50 that I would even see anything that late in the season to shoot. So she put me out, and I sat watching over the field until near dark when a couple of does (couldn’t shoot them then) came out followed by a spike. I watched them all the while trying to remember my mom’s command not to shoot anything. But, I just couldn’t take it.

I put the cross hairs on his shoulder and dropped him. I then went and dragged him over to the edge of the field by the road to proudly wait on my mom to pick me up. I don’t even want to repeat what she said when she arrived, but to say that she was not counting on me having a deer would be an understatement. However like she always does, she made the best of the situation by rearranging the entire car’s worth of luggage and presents so that the back was empty enough for my deer to fit. However the only thing we had to keep the blood out of the car was her hanging clothes bag! So down it went, in went the deer, and off we went to the deer processors.

My mom still tells this story to this day as an example of the many problems I have caused her over the years. And I wouldn’t trade the memory for anything. Thanks mom!

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