There's a Tick in My Underwear!

I grew up in the largest city in New Hampshire, so when my parents bought a rustic cabin in the wilderness so we could “get away from it all” during summer vacations, you might say I was less than excited. In fact, my expression when they informed me we’d be spending most of the summer in the middle of nowhere, kind of resembled that of someone who’d just been told she needed an appendectomy.

For one thing, the cabin featured the most dreaded building in the history of my existence…the outhouse.  One look at the rickety old structure all but promised an instant case of constipation. And the cabin had no electricity, no running water, and…heaven forbid…no TV. Staying there, I was certain, wasn’t going to be a vacation, it was going to be nothing short of torture for a 12, almost 13-year-old, city-slicker. I didn’t want to leave behind everything that was familiar to me – concrete, streetlights, bowling alleys, ice-cream trucks and most of all…cute boys. I had planned to experience my first kiss that summer, but how was I supposed to do that at the cabin, unless I wanted to kiss a squirrel?

Not wanting to suffer alone, I convinced my good friend, Janet, to come with me on my wilderness “adventure.”  After all, friends were supposed to share both the good and bad, right? So together, Janet and I learned the ups and downs of primitive living – the mice in the blankets, the leeches in the river, the scary noises in the bushes…and the country boys at the local swimming hole, who vastly differed from city boys. In such an unlikely place, Janet met the love of her young life, her Prince Charming. I, however, met 10,000 mosquitoes, every species of snake native to New Hampshire…and Conrad.

I changed the names and locations in this book to protect the not-so-innocent, but the plot was taken directly from the entries in my 1962 journal, which were too hysterical not to share!