Stickers

I was pulling weeds yesterday as I am woefully behind and the frequent rains have made the job approach a crisis point. I came upon stickers (!), the bane of barefoot children. I had almost forgotten about since living in Texas. After I pulled them, it occured to me that I probably should have shown the boys what they were, if only for nostalgia's (and their poor feet's) sake.

One of the funny things about spending the boys' early childhood in a region of the country that was entirely different than the one I grew up: my kids don't know about stickers. When we moved here, my boys were boys of the West. Their familiarity lay with irrigation canals (don't jump in 'em!), dry air, open space, mountains, blazing sun with few trees, cloudless summers and long dank winters.

So we've had to educate them on the things I always took for granted. How to identify poison ivy. Lightning bugs. June bugs. Why you sweat within 2 minutes of going outside in the summer. Thunderstorms (we really never had many!). Tornados. Green--growing out of every crevice. Non-wildfires--last year when that baseball player's plane hit a Manhatten skyrise and went ablaze, Zac asked me how many acres the fire was. Why you stay out of a drainage ditch, especially in the days after a storm. Chick-fil-A. Copperheads (we'll get to that one eventually).

Yes, I know we are in the Midwest and not Texas, but it is much more a piece with the South than Idaho was (after all, we are only a little over 3 hours north of the Arkansas border). Now the boys are getting really acclimated and familiarity is more Kansas City than Boise. But I still find occasional reminders that the boys (for now) are transplants and need to know what stickers, and other little Southern/Midwestern things are.