One warm summer day
when I was about five or six, Dad and Mother had to go to Burley, Idaho after
something. I was taken down to Uncle
Vance and Aunt Vida’s place to play with Cousin Marilyn, while they were
gone. Marilyn was about two years older than I was. We played, swung on the big rope
swing out under the trees in the back yard and had a good time. Then we decided that we would make some mud
pies. We mixed up a nice batch of mud to
make our pies or cookies out of. While
we were looking in the old root cellar near where we had our pies laid out we
found a light brown tube of jelly like stuff.
When we mixed the jelly like substance to our pies it greatly improved
the texture. We would lay them on a
board and pat them out and were certainly proud of ourselves when we looked at
our array of pies.
When Aunt Vida called
us in for dinner, hurried and washed our hands and cleaned up. As we were eating, Uncle Vance asked us what
we had been doing. We excitedly told
them what we had been doing and how good our array of pies looked. We told him we found some of the best stuff
to mix into our pies. He asked us where
we found it and what it looked like. We
said, “Down in the old cellar.” Uncle
Vance’s face went white, he got up from the table and went outside. When he came back he told us we had been
using dynamite. It was some that
Grandfather Lind had used years before.
It was old and had liquefied and even the slightest jar could have made
the nitroglycerin in it explode. Luckily
he could find no more.
