Deedle, Deedle Your House Is on Fire!: And Other Short Stories About Childhood Adventures

By Dr. Daisy Nelson Century and John Jenkins Jr.

Deedle, Deedle Your House Is on Fire is a book for all ages. It is a collection of short stories about a little girl, her brothers, neighbors, and the fun games and daredevil stunts they did in the summertime on the farm to occupy their time. These are the best collection of short stories since Tom Sawyer. They will pull you right in and share their adventures with you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524536886

Dr. Daisy Nelson Century

In her high school year book her goals were to win a couple of  Oscars, Emmys, write and produce movies.  She has several books to take off right after Zach.  Zach makes the third book that she has written.  The first novel was entitled:  Belle, the second book:  Ms. Emmalines Little Book of Wit and Wisdom and now Zach.  She performs one woman shows of seven historical women:  Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Bessie Coleman, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Fields, Phyllis Wheatley and Hatshepsut.  When she is not performing she writes, practices the guitar, the violin and karate.  She earned her Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do karate last year.  To the Literary World and Hollywood  make way for  Dr. Daisy Nelson Century.  She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

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Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Daisy Nelson Century.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5245-3689-3

                eBook           978-1-5245-3688-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/30/2016

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Chapter One Deedle, Deedle Your House Is On Fire!

Chapter Two Minding The Cows

Chapter Three Dirt Pot

Chapter Four Walk Peanuts Walk

Chapter Five Christmas Will Never Be Christmas Again

Chapter Six Wesgo And Other Field Sweets

Chapter Seven Going Into And Coming Out Of The Wilderness

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D eedle, Deedle your house is on fire is a collection of short stories as seen through the eyes of a little girl growing up on the farm in South Carolina in the late fifties and sixties. It includes some of the very unique games, activities and chores that she, her brothers, sister and neighbors did to occupy their time during the summer time and the resourcefulness they had to make up for not having toys. A deedle is a little bug (today’s pill bug) that lived in very soft sand under the farm house. When it was too hot to play in the yard, we would play under the house where it was cool.

We would take a stick and stir in the deedle’s house and repeat the phrase, Deedle, Deedle you house is on fire! Your house is on fire! And the deedle would surface to the top. We would be amazed! That was so cool!! Then we would look for deeedle houses until we got bored and moved on to something else.

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Having those childhood adventures allowed me to see the beauty of the world first hand.

God takes care of fools and little children.

I now know the difference between an adult and children. Children live

life fearless,

   fearless!

Fearless!

Fearless!

   Fearless!

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T his book is also dedicated to my sisters and brothers: Glenn, Betty, Liza, Myer, Fonza, and Lukie (may he rest in peace). A special thanks to Glenn for stirring the idea in my head and helping me to gather the stories from our childhood. To Myer and Fonza, my partners in crime and for making it through our childhood adventures alive and well. To my brother Lukie, for spoiling Christmas for the rest of my life. To all of my childhood friends: Johanna (we called her Dranne), Yvonne (we called her Vonnie), Betty Jane (we called her B e t t y –J e a n in slow motion), and my brothers friend Len (we called him Blazer). Lastly, but certainly not least, my parents, Lawton and Sadie Nelson (may they rest in peace) for allowing me the opportunity to explore and have those childhood adventures.

Also to all of the Nelson Family, the descendants of Gibbie and Hester Nelson of Cross, South Carolina.

CHAPTER ONE

DEEDLE, DEEDLE YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE!

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I t was one of those hot summer dog days of August on a farm in Carolina in the latter days of the fifties early sixties. We were out of school for the summer with no particular place to go or no particular thing to do. It was so hot the chickens walked around with their mouths open and wings out trying to keep cool. It was so hot we could see the heat rising off in the distance; wavy and dusty-like. We called it seeing the monkey rise. The folks would say, If you stay in the sun you’ll monkey. That means you will faint from the heat. It was so hot there was stillness in the air. It was a spooky time, like Halloween, or walking by a grave yard at dusk or a moon eclipse or something, just a weird feeling. That time slot between 12 noon and 4:30 was the hottest part of the day. There were no birds flying, no ants crawling not even a cool summer’s breeze. The leaves on the trees didn’t move. The leaves looked wilted. It was still. All we heard was one’s breathing. We didn’t hear a dog barking, someone’s laughter echoing in the distance or a car rolling by on the highway. Nothing, just hot stillness. We would squint our eyes and look all around. It was like being in a time warp zone. Everything was in s-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n. The old folks would say that it was so hot you could fry eggs on the sand. It was so hot the sand would burn our feet. We didn’t care. We learned how to walk on hot sand bare feet. You had to turn your feet toward the inside and walk on the edge of the foot, hopping and skipping all along the hot sand.

Sometimes we would find a shady spot in the road, a spot that had beach type sand. I can not figure out for the life of me what made us eat the sand. We would pick a good spot, take out all the little sticks, leaves and pebbles and smooth the sand over with our hands a couple of times. This smoothing motion made the sand clear of all debris; ready for eating. Then we would scoop up a handful and eat it. I remember the glass/ice cracking sound it made as we devoured handful after handful. We ate the sand like when we ate rice and tomato soup until were full. I can’t remember our stomach or any other body parts hurting after that sand meal. We never wondered if the sand came out or not. Sometimes now I am wondering if that sand is still in my colons. I also wondered if that sand did us good. I wondered if that sand was like rotor-rooter moving all debris out of the colon. Every now and then I wonder about the lost sand meals.

Come on let’s git our screens and go look fa money in the road, my brothers said. Sure let me git mine, I replied. You see we all had these old window screens that got too ragged for the window so it was thrown on the trash pile. We looked at this old ragged screen as our pan– to pan for gold. To us this was our way to get summer money fa candy and cookies. We were licking our chops. First, we would walk up and down the dirt road until we found just the right spot. We just couldn’t pan anywhere; it had to be a good spot. It was usually a spot in the road with a lot of sand; we figure the more sand the more money. We figure when people walked down the road, they would drop money and because of the sand been very thick they would not find it. We would