It’s been more than fifty years and my brother Bill still has nose out of joint over a little goose bite that he suffered way back in first grade. Hard to imagine holding a grudge against poultry that long. Billy was Daddy’s shadow, making every step he made. Though I was normally with them, somehow I missed this day. Had I not discovered a note very much like this he wrote to his friend, Donnie, I’d never have learned of his misfortune.
On this particular day, Daddy and Uncle Dunc swapped lies over coffee on the high front porch of Uncle Dunc’s place while Billy played with the twins, Fats and Little Boy on the hard-packed clay underneath. Despite the descriptive names, I couldn’t tell the boys apart. The decrepit, unpainted house might have been sound at some point in the distant past, but it wouldn’t have withstood much of a windstorm now. The corners perched crazily on stacked piles of iron-ore rocks, oxidizing to dust in the weather. Chickens, ducks, and geese roamed freely over the yard and under the porch. We were warned to watch for snakes in the shadows under the porch, but a far greater danger was the ever-present foulness left behind by the numerous fowl pursuing insects into the shade.
Daddy called out to Billy, “Son, go get me a pack of Camels off the dash of my truck.”
Unhappily for Billy, as he trotted toward the truck on his mission, he made an attractive target for an aggressive gander patrolling the yard. Honking, the monster pursued Billy, chomping down on the backside of his jeans. As poor Billy fled, the goose hung on tightly and flogged him roundly. Of course, Daddy rescued him, but it must have seemed like it took forever, as the kids and adults all around him laughed at his misery. He came home sporting a big bruise and a lifelong dislike of geese.
As she packed for this trip and opened the freezer to put in some more goodies, she discovered the tragic aftermath of a power outage leaving her with the putrid remains of her previously frozen food mounded up with writhing maggots. The frisky, fat maggots seized the opportunity to leap for freedom all down the front of her shirt, leaving her awash in foul juices and previous generations of incarcerated maggots. When her son called in the middle of the fiasco, he was appalled to learn such valuable fishing bait had been 
Sometimes I get obsessive about canning and filling my freezers. I make a point to get to it the markdowns at the meat counter and in the produce department. You get great deals that way. The butcher was marking meat down as I was making my selection today. I simply handed him my purchases and he checked the date and marked it right then. If I had been five minutes earlier, I’d have paid thirty percent more. It made my day. I make sure to watch the dates in he freezer and can the meat up if it’s been there a few months. I buy whole turkeys after the holidays, bake them, and can the turkey and broth. I still have four quarts of canned turkey from Christmas. It makes great soup, turkey salad, pot pies, and casseroles.
Q1) When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
Nutsrok 