The Spanking Spoon and The Lakeside3

  My aunt, like many nurses in the mid-nineties, was a smoker, so she would often wander away for large periods of time to ‘keep the smoke off the kids’. She smoked in the car with us in it, so I don’t know why outside that was suddenly such a big deal for her, but it made no difference to us, and we were often left unsupervised to do as we liked when my aunt went for a cigarette. Jimmy and I splashed around in the water for a while but eventually, the call of the rope swing was too great and my aunt was so far away. We could see her all the way on the other side of the street, standing by the small snack stand. So, when the older kids tired of swinging and began to attempt to ‘log roll’ on a tree that had fallen into the water, we saw our chance and hurried over, making sure she was still where we assumed her to be. “We can’t let her see us!” Jimmy hissed conspiratorially as we snuck toward the swing. To this day, I’m fairly sure my aunt has X-ray vision and supersonic hearing because she could literally hear a misdeed from a mile away. Knowing what I know now, I’m sure she was watching that swing like a hawk to make sure we didn’t go near it.