102322c

I was seven and my sister six when we started waiting for the school bus at the end of our road. This was a little over half a mile from our house (two houses and woods in between) and we waited with a few other kids. They were from the other part of the neighborhood. The other people living on our road were old: maybe as old as I am now. This was fine, until my father was bitten by a rabid Fox in our driveway. There was an epidemic of rabid wild animals that year. Rabid animals are aggressive, unlike the copperhead we found in the driveway. After he was bitten, my dad had to have a series of huge shots in his stomach, and I sure didn't want that! I couldn't imagine anything worse.

It wasn't practical to run all the way home, especially not up and down hills. Most of the way I walked, looking everywhere for foxes. When I got to the end of the path that went up through the woods to our house (you could see our house from there but the path went through the woods instead of over the septic field) I ran as fast as I could until I slammed the front door behind me. I probably did that for about a year.