The Real Story

   I had the opportunity to have dinner last night with my Uncle JP and Aunt Wanda. I hadn't seen them in nearly 20 years. I knew that their visit here was going to be busy. The last time my uncle came out here it was for the funeral of his father, my grandfather. There were a lot of people they wanted to see and lots of places to visit. They made time for me and I was touched.
  I also wanted to find out the truth about something I remembered from childhood. One year, over Christmas, my grandparents flew to Virginia to see Uncle JP and his family. My family stayed at the farm to tend to the livestock. At some point during while we were there I remember that my mother had sent a certain package and a note to my uncle. I always wondered if this really happened or if it was something I managed to make up.
  The way I remembered it was that Uncle JP called Mom to complain about the weather in Virginia. It was freezing there, everyone was so cold. It was 40 degrees and miserable. Meanwhile, on the farm in Wisconsin, it was 40 below zero and my parents had to go out to the barn every day to feed and milk the cows and clean the barn. That was truly miserable.
  When I mentioned it to Uncle JP he started to chuckle. He remembered it well and told me what happened.
  Uncle JP said that he loved to harass my mother. Anything he could do to get under her skin he would do and that continued when they were adults. He called my mother and asked where my grandparents were. She assumed they were in Virginia with him and his family. He told her that they never arrived. Did they get on the right plane? Had they missed a connection or something? Did she even take them to the airport? He kept this up as my mother got increasingly more upset and worried that her parents really were missing. After awhile she realized that JP was leading her on.
  She did something that only my mother would think of. She went down to the barn and got some fresh cow manure. She wrapped it up and packed it carefully. She added a note and took it to the post office. There, that would fix him.
  I chuckled. I knew it had to be something other than the weather. That was just too petty a thing to do something like that. I had to admire my mother for thinking of such a creative reply. The real capper was the note. It said, "A little shit for a big shit."
  Mystery solved.