We lived in North Carolina at the time because A was in the Marine Corps. We lived on base and the housing wasn’t 2 bad.

Every weekend we went down to the shore and to our favorite pier and fished. Now I am afraid to touch fish, worms and other equally disgusting things. I put shrimp on my fishing pole. If I caught something A would have to take it off the line. That was all there was to it. 

K1 would run around and kick the sharks off the pier. The others weren’t too happy about that. They didn’t want them back in the water to catch. She wasn’t more than 3 years old at the most. K2 was around 2 years old or so and was in the playpen and practicing for her future career as a pitcher. She threw everything across the pier and into the water including her bottle. Great job.!

This one day we caught a lot of fish and A didn’t eat fish. He usually cleaned them for me. This day he said if I wanted to eat them I had to clean them. We took them home and he dumped them in the sink.

“Relax, they are all dead now and they won’t hurt you.”

I looked at him and the sink and he hand me the knife.

I tried to pick one up very carefully. It was slippery and kept sliding back into the sink. I finally got a couple cleaned and picked up another one.

Well it moved in my hand and the next thing I knew a fish went flying through the air and into the wall. Splat! The knife followed it.

That was it! I was done cleaning fish. A finally finished cleaning them for me.

I never, ever touched another one dead or alive, which was interesting when the kids wanted to fish in the lake in front of our house and actually caught a fish. “Wait til your dad gets home!”