Scorpions and Crawdads

I hate scorpions. You know, I never saw one until we moved to Gilbert, which seems funny since I grew up only a few miles from there, but for some reason we didn't have them in Mesa. I heard about them, of course. My grandparents talked about seeing scorpions at their place, but they said it was because they had date trees. Other people talked about having them in homes that were built near orange groves, so I guess they liked citrus trees, as well.

Our home in Gilbert was built on old farm land, so perhaps that's why we had scorpians. They weren't really bad, but every few months we'd come across one of the little devils, climbing a wall, scurrying across the floor, or lying dead in a corner. We had a bug man spray every month, and that helped, I'm sure. Dad bought a black-light, as well, and during the summer he'd go scorpion hunting at night with the boys. They usually found twenty or more hiding out behind the brick wall he'd built, behind which he stored his tractor and farm equipment.

Although they were smaller, scorpions reminded me of the crawdads the kids found in the creek up at the cabin. Those started appearing about the same time as we moved to Gilbert, and they both freaked me out. One summer the kids caught a whole pail full of the nasty critters, brought them back to the cabin, and insisted on boiling them for dinner. Ewwwww, they were disgusting, but it was kind of fun. Only, afterward, I had an awful nightmare that we were cooking and trying to eat crawdads, but they turned into scorpions. Yuck!

We were lucky, I suppose, that we had very few people get stung by scorpions during the seventeen years we lived in Gilbert. Mom was stung once, while she was digging up a flower garden. Moe got stung, too, and one or two of the kids, but it really wasn't bad. Not like other people I heard about.

Just the other day my daughter-in-law told me about what happened to my little granddaughter, Brooklyn. They had gone up to Bartlett Lake for a day of fishing. Russell and Mary were busy putting the boat into the water, and little Brooklyn was sitting on the ice-chest in the back of their pick-up.

“Mom, Dad, come see the real live crawdad in the truck,” she yelled to them.

They ran over to see what she was talking about, and found a huge scorpion crawling around her feet! They really do look alike.