BUGS!

There was something about Dorothy that could not be denied. When she was young, the force of her presence was accentuated by her rare, but very real, episodes of hysteria. The first such that I recall happened when she was probably about eight years old. She'd been upstairs one day in the small room at the top of the front stairway when we who were downstairs heard her piercing and ungodly screams. Ma raced upstairs to find that a June bug had latched on to Dorothy's big toe, causing her to feel pain and repulsion at the same time. It took a while for my mother to soothe her, even after the bug had been forcibly removed, and, presumably, squashed. Ma was good at that. Dorothy never forgot about that June bug, and throughout her life, would shudder at the sound those beetles make when they buzz against the screens on a summer's night.
Another summer night, several years later, we were sitting on the front porch, at least my father and I were, when hysterical screams and sobs emanated from the kitchen. Dorothy had started to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich she had made, and had bitten into a large blobby mass that she instantly identified as a scorpion. She was inconsolable, and though she seldom deliberately brought attention to herself, it was impossible for anyone around to ignore the extent of her visible distress. The entire family, and I think her friend Sandy, all took turns peering at the glob of jelly in which Dorothy pointed out the tentacles and or legs of a recognizable scorpion, as a scorpion which had come to be preserved in jelly might well appear. The offending jar was emptied and examined, but no further clues were identified. Dorothy's hysteria finally waned, either because of fatigue and or our father's intervention. Not one to become overly involved at flights of fancy or imagination, even he could not disregard the intensity of Dorothy's passionate outburst. He took the scientific approach of placing the alleged scorpion in a glass of water, saying if it were a harmless mass of strawberry goo, it would dissolve, but if it were indeed a scorpion, the remnants of its carcass would be intact in the morning. Oddly enough, I can't recall the determination of the autopsy. But I do know that we never forgot the "Scorpion Story" either.