Memories of Enterprise: Summertime, Southern-style

Ricky Adams
Ledger Correspondent
Published: June 26, 2008

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll and their application by the Enterprise High School class of 1968, plus thrills from 1988, 1998 and half of 2008 were mentioned here a week ago as today’s topics.
Space permitting, we’ll get to them.
First, let’s talk about summertime staples besides S.D.R&R…such as Vacation Bible School, those weeklong, frolicsome summertime events most churches hold.
Today, “Castaway Island,” “Moonlight Bay,” “Starship Adventure,” “Romping in the Park” and an endless skein of VBS aliases are employed to entice young’uns to forsake their video games for a few hours daily, celebrate their youth and religion and discover new things as we once did.
Personally, three VBS discoveries are most memorable.
The three, made at First Methodist Church, were: lack of artistic skill, pretzels and Hawaiian Punch.
In the early years - already in the clutches of the vixen who ultimately become our senior class homecoming queen, Mary Rollins (Cannon) - cutting out religious-themed-pictures and pasting them on construction paper posed no problems.
After that it was all downhill as evidenced by the baskets we wove one summer.
We were provided a wooden base, with pre-drilled holes. We soaked the basket-making reeds in water overnight and wove our baskets the next morning.
Somewhere in the House of Adams, that basket remains; the patina it’s taken on the last half century adds nothing to the wopsidedest basket ever wove!
Sadly, the basket was but the first in a skein of projects that has yet to yield even one yard-sale item.
However, our family’s only child has excelled in consuming pretzels, Hawaiian Punch and most other items summertime produces.
Recently, grandson Lane Marler, 10, discovered a new hot weather fare: mulberries he found dangling from a tree in public view that’s obviously been skulking there more than a quarter century.
Now, when we have our weekly summer “fruit day,” we enjoy mulberries that stain everything they touch, blackberries, wild yellow and red plums, watermelons, honeydews and cantaloupes or “mushmelons” as some say.
Later this summer, we’ll relish locally-grown and personally-boiled peanuts. We’ll ice down personally-picked bullaces and scuppernongs and mow through them like, uh, corn through a goose.
Note: Type “bullaces,” “scuppernongs,” “scupnins” or “scuplins” on your computer to see what Mr. Bill Gates’ dictionary does.
Lane’s heard about blackberry nectar Mother made for years, and he savors Red Rock imitation peach and imitation grape sodas on the rocks.
He’s yet to sample maypop seeds, but that’ll end soon; we’ve spotted some maypop vines right beside the plum trees where we shared our most favorite wild fruit with a couple of LARGE snakes that arrived before we did one early June morning.
A rising fifth-grader, Lane eats turnips, collards, butterbeans, and corn, on and off the cob, plus most everything else that grows locally.
Recently, he discovered a new taste sensation: Vidalia onion slices dipped in catsup or ketchup.
Now there’s a strange item. Officially, tomatoes are a fruit but catsup/ketchup is a vegetable for guvmint purposes, like appearing on cafeteria lines.
Lane has spotted chinaberries before he discovered mulberries, but he hasn’t been tempted to eat one nor has he expressed interest in eating catalpa (aka Catawba or “tauger”) worms.
Oops.
No space left for sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Maybe next time.