Another summer at Ma and Papa's house.  Seems as if my whole youth rotated around my mom's parents house.....that's not so, it was just where the most interesting events seemed to have taken place.
     A particular evening, Roger and I would take a shovel down to the barn and look for some dried up cow pies.  We would turn the cow pie over and dig up the dirt underneath.  We would always find big earthworms.  We had a coffee can (1 lb. size if anyone is interested) with both ends cut out and the plastic lids from two cans applied.  (one on each end).  You wouldn't think that all the explanatory remarks would be needed, but remember I am talking to Pierson's for the most part.  The coffee can was 1/2 full of our special formula, half dirt and half coffee grounds (used of course).  This was a tip from our grandfather.  Before that, I had never thought about worms liking coffee....that's another reason I liked staying there, the down to earth education we got.  Any way, we got a lot of worms that seemed to like coffee and manure....makes me wonder if there is something in common with the two....research for another day.
     We would take the can back up to the house and put it in the cool shade, where ever we could find some and proceed to step 2....the water for the next day.  We would get an empty Chlorox jug from our grandmother, rinse it out well and fill it with water and put it in the chest freezer on the back porch.  By the next morning it was solid ice.
We would use the jug for cool drinks almost all day.  We would also get a brown paper sack with our lunch fixins...6 slices of bread and 6 hot dogs.  Into our pockets went about 2 dozen kitchen matches.....you can't eat cold hot dogs.  If we were lucky there might be a couple of small packages of potato chips or fritos we could pack along.
     After the preparation, we would get ready for bed and try to get some sleep, planning our all day fishing expedition.  In the morning, at the crack of dawn, we were up, but not quite ready for the expedition, had to have some of Ma's breakfast, sausage or bacon, eggs and pancakes with real home made butter and whole (chunky as robin calls todays whole milk)milk, I'm talking about having to shake it up to mix the cream into the milk.  If you didn't shake it up well enough you really did get to bit into the chunks of cream. 
     After breakfast, Roger and I would get our fishing poles (cane poles of course....not the sectional ones but the 10 to 12 feet long ones) a small tackle box with spare hooks, line, sinkers and real corks (like the ones that would go into the tops of one gallon jugs); our lunch and our frozen bottle of water.  Then we would head out for the "ponds".  The ponds were out at Miss Weir's place that my grandfather had rented from her ever since the 1930's.  It was 40 or 80 acres just north     of Dennis Sullivan's place and caddy-cornered from the old Jack Craddock place.  It was probably 3/4 of a mile or a mile from our grandparents place in town.  We got started across the field heading south until we got to the brick plant road the head west to the corner....There was a railroad track at that intersection that I don't ever remember seeing a train on.  We would head south again the the next corner 1/2 mile away.  The Craddock (and later Johnny and Betty Poznich's) place was on the east side of the road.  When we got to the corner we would turn right for a couple hundred feet and enter the 40 acres where the "ponds" were.
     We would follow the cow path back to the ponds, the easiest way to get there.  (another research project for another day, why do the cow's follow the exact same path until it is a foot deep or more?)  There were several ponds on the place.  A long and fairly narrow one, that only seemed to have perch less than two inches long in it.  Then our favorite over about 50 feet to the west, which was more or less circular with a few willow trees on its northern bank also with a hill to the west of it.  The fishing was ok there, but for some strange reason, we liked to fish it best.

     There was another pond further south, another long and skinny one, I don't think I ever caught any fish from.  .>>>>>>I do remember that Butch was fishing there with a lucky 13 plug and threw it too close to the shore and our dachound jumped out and caught the plug in the side of his mouth.  The dog whimpered a little and Butch was crying and holding the dog.  My grandpa came up about that time and told Butch to put the dog down and just pet his back.  Papa then took out his pocket knife and made a small incision in the dog's mouth and extracted the treble hook.  The dog must have  known that Papa knew what he was doing, he stopped whimpering and let Papa do his work and put a little Corona Salve on the cut and Kaiser was good as new in a couple of days.<<<<<<<<<<<<<

     Back to the fishing, or rather ponds.  As I said before the circular pond had a hill on the west side and if you went over the hill, you would come down to the "S" pond, called that because it was shaped like the letter S.  It had some pretty good fish in it, but seemed to be extremely difficult to entice to bite.  We stayed at the circular pond and baited up our hooks and put them in the water and sat down ready for the action to start.  The action started almost immediately, with the perch about 2 inches long eating the worm off the hook and not large enough to get himself caught up on the hook.  This would require rebaiting the hook and moving about 25 or 30 feet away to get out of that little fishes neighborhood.  Action was good this morning with bites, but not with catches....the little ones seemed to be the only thing biting.  Maybe we had the hooks too high up in the water, we both slid our corks up until there was about 4 feet of line below the cork,  we were sure we would be down to the level of the big ones now.

     As the sun moved higher in the sky and we started to sweat, we decided that cooling of was our number one priority.   Off came the clothes and into the water we went.  We stayed in splashing each other for probably 20 to 30 minutes and then came out and sun dried.  We didn't take a towel with us because the folks would know what we were up to (not that they didn't know anyway).  After we dried off with the help of the sun, we got dressed and gathered up some sticks and small logs and started up a fire to cook the hot dogs we brought with us.  We had a good lunch with the grilled dogs on dry bread and chased down with the icewater in the Chlorox jug.  When we finished, we re-baited the hooks and got back to the serious fishing.  On this particular trip we didn't have any "keepers" to put on the stringer and take back to the house to put into the well in the back yard.

    We would start back at a time that we thought was about 1 1/2 hours before sunset so we wouldn't get caught up in any chores before dinner.  Most of the time there were some chores waiting for us anyway.  It was usually slopping the hogs our grandfather kept to sell for supplemental income or butcher to feed the throngs of grandkids that came a visitin'. 

More, later........................