Memoir Monday : How to Scare the Living Sh*t Out of Your Mother!

I'm 37 but still manage to get myself in trouble on occasion. This past weekend, my older brother yelled at me for never telling any stories about him. So D, this one if for you!

I am once again dipping my toe in the Memoir Monday pond with Travis over at I Like to Fish. Click the link and go visit him, I dare you. And check out the other swimmers while you're there.




I was sitting there making a mental list of the stories I could tell about my brother. I began thinking about the college years (we both attended the same University). A couple of stories popped into my head, but then I remembered that my dad reads my blog and figured I'd better not tell them. So I reached way back and pulled this little doozy out for your enjoyment.

My brother and I, being 15 months apart, played really well together. We were good kids. We never really got into trouble. My mom could leave us alone in a room with our toys and go about doing all the mom things that she did without too much worry that we would physically harm ourselves...

...well at least until one fateful day. I was about 4 or 5 and mom left us in my room with a bunch of blankets so that we could build a fort. We made lots of forts. As any veteran fort maker knows, you need stuff to hold it up. So we piled "stuff", precariously I'm sure (I'm actually not sure, but I figure that's probably what we did), on the dresser and the bed to hold up the ends of the blankets.

We also used a lamp.

Yep...a lamp...with the shade off.

Can you guess where this is going! Well you'd be wrong. I'm sure the shadeless lamp was, at least briefly, used as a blanker holder upper, but not for long. Apparently, one of us (I'm sure it was my brother...I was an angel...I NEVER did anything wrong) had the bright idea to make smoke signals...

which we did.

Until mom came running and put out the fire.

And if she was smart never let us make forts without adult supervision again...