At the tender age of nine my sister was not the most logical thinking person but she could function. Those nine-year-old hands were in charge of me when I was seven. One day my sister and I had a plan of leaving the yard that we were playing in to go adventuring in the woods. I had the job of telling my mom that we were leaving by yelling up the stairs to her. Somehow, through some black hole perhaps, my little boy voice did not reach her. My sister and I started off on our trailblazing adventure through our neighborhood woods in search of an escapade.

As I stand at the foot of the portentous woods I look down trying to avoid eye contact with my big bold sister as she tries to convince me to come along.
“Come on in, it’s not like the woods are gonna bite you,” she objects.
With that positive reinforcement of someone who had a couple more summers under her belt I was immediately reassured to go. I velcro my shoes and away we go. We start on a path that had been developed from years of my dad going out to the woods to dump all the leaves we collect during fall. Those leaves were the only addition that the woods had seen in sometime. We walk the path for a few minutes it soon becomes my sister’s path as she makes it up as we go along. After tailing along her coat tails like a puppy, I finally step back and take in the awesomeness of the woods. As the sunlight sneaks through the tall trees and reaches the moist ground floor covered in debris I think to myself all the trees in the woods could make hundreds of wooden ships
. Hearing the pitter-patter of little animal feet scurrying along the ground and up to their trees for safety as these two big bad kids enter. As we are truck along on our jaunt we come across our first roadblock: a babbling brook. I gasp, thinking about how I am going to defeat this obstacle? I turn to for guidance and she says.
“This thing is bigger than the Mississippi River, you think you can handle it?” in a demeaning tone.
I respond with a shrug and challenge her with spelling Mississippi. After the one stand I took that afternoon I was quickly brought back down to size when she and her darn third grade abilities got me. She spelled it correctly. I thought that question stumped everyone.
Back at my abode my mother has been in a tizzy wondering where her lost baby chicks have gone. My mom gets in the car after combing through every inch of our house calling our names and searching the yard. She drives around the neighborhood, honking her horn and yelling our names out the window. To no avail of that plan my mom heads back home, calls the neighbors and asks politely and firmly.
“Do you know where Katy and Danny are?”
No one seems to know where her children have disappeared to. As the sun sits at its peak in the sky no kids have come home yet she grows frantic and calls the police. My mom nervously twiddles her thumbs and waits for the boys in blue to show at our house, while my sister and me are enjoying nature less than a quarter mile away.
My sister gracefully leaps over the stream as I think, Great, now I need to jump this. I take five steps back, look down at my scrawny legs and think, Here goes nothing. I take off like a bat out of hell, plant my right foot on the damp dirt and push off. The point at which I knew I wasn’t going to make it was, when I took off. I landed somewhere between embarrassingly bad jumping skills and dreadful. Right in the water is where I ended up. My sister hadn’t had a good chance to laugh at me in a while so she took full advantage of the situation. Our next move was going to be head home and have some bologna sandwiches.
My mom now is standing down at the bottom of our long driveway impatiently waiting for the search and rescue units to arrive. When the first police officer shows up my mom wastes no time and jumps at him and grabs him by the shirt collar and demands “Find my kids!”
As my sister and I come trudging out of the woods down two houses from our house we are approached by a police officer. My sister says, “ We are in big trouble” I thought we were trespassing and were going to be sent to the pokey.
He asks us “ Are you two Katy and Danny by any chance?”
We nod nervously and mutter out the word “yes”
He says, “ You two come with me.” It

With her arms flaying, my mom races towards my sister and me as we walk along with the officer. She repeats over and over again “ Never do that again” while she holds us in her arms. Looking at this experience I have grown to realize it wasn’t my entire sisters fault and maybe I couldn’t fully function too.