Childhood Narrative:
Pluff Mud and Peanuts
We spent childhood summers at our beach house on Edisto Island. One especially long summer, we sat around a pile of Mama's home-boiled peanuts with a view of the marsh that could keep us occupied for days with its own story. The cooking peanuts stank up the whole house, but they were worth it. Davis and I fought to collect the most "jackpot peanuts", our term for a pod of four or even five nuts. I was convinced they tasted the best.
We are too close in age, my brother and I, and it has always gotten us into trouble. Some careless span of summer-time later, we found ourselves in the shed rummaging through beach relics, old but still holding on to their manufactured tropic charm. Old kites and broken beach chairs littered the room, but led the way to another kind of jackpot for my brother and I: a box of matches. We were mesmerized by the quick scratch against the box, the whoosh when ignited, the sizzle and smell of the burned out flame. We lit match after match, blowing them out like birthday candles, or holding them between two fingers until we got scared and extinguished the tiny fire, burning just millimeters from our skin.
The same nose that thought it wise to boil 10 pounds of peanuts in a small, hot house also had the keenest sense for danger, or misbehaving children. My mother burst into the shed, furiously yelling, "You're gonna burn this house down! How stupid are you? Where did I go wrong?!" Whenever we get into trouble, Mama likes to go on about her failures as a mother. She began her long-winded lament as my brother, a true middle child used to being scolded, stood remorseless. I, on the other hand, felt as red hot in the face as those matches. I could have burned the house down. I could have killed my whole entire family. They would have burned to death in this house that smells like boiled peanuts and pluff mud.
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