“Look! Mama, look! I found some wild onions growing out in the front yard.”
When we were out playing as children, we would sometimes hunt for wild onions. Mama, after cleaning them, would chip the onions and sauté them in a small amount of grease from our own salt pork. They were delicious.
This particular morning I was not looking for wild onions. It was in the springtime of the year and I had the desire to dig in the yard with a hoe. I had gone to the barn and selected my favorite hoe and was in the front yard digging what was to be my garden. As I dug I was thinking of all the things I would plant. Then, as I knocked off a large chunk of dirt from my hoe, I saw an onion. I picked it up and looked more closely. I had cut it in two with the hoe, but it was an onion. So I dug again and got it up.
Well, there must be more near where I found this one. So I dug some more. Yes! I found another and another and another. I dug until I could find no more. I had cut all of them into several pieces while I was digging for them. But that did not matter because Mama always chopped them into little pieces anyway. I ran and got an empty half-gallon syrup can to put them in. After I gathered them, I ran into the house to Mama.
“I have a lot. I dug them all up. They are so much bigger than the ones we usually find after the green tops come up.” Mama turned from washing dishes and looked in the bucket. My sister, Lois, who was nine years older than I, had come into the kitchen and looked at my onions also.
I was standing there grinning from ear to ear waiting for them to congratulate me. Lois turned towards me and hollered, “You monkey! Those are not onions at all. They are my Gladiolus bulbs that I planted last fall.”
By then she was crying. “Why, why did you do it Lorine? Why have you chopped them up so much there is no way they would ever live if I planted them again. You monkey, you monkey. Why did you do it?”
As it turned out, I learned that one of her friends, Karl Horst, had given her the bulbs and she had planted them in the yard. I had not known about it. The Horst family now owns several florist all over. I was very sorry about what I had done but there was no way of undoing it now. It took a long time for Lois to forgive me and a long time for me to quit feeling so guilty.