Opossum Lake

It is Mother’s Day, so it would only make sense to talk about a time my mother may have tried to murder me. Or this is a story about me exaggerating the events of a Sunday morning. 

My mother loves to read murder mystery and detective novels.  When I was a surely teenager I remember us both burning through Sue Grafton  and Mary Higgins Clark novels. After reading so many novels there becomes a check list of things that look suspicious when they happen in real life.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The birds were chirping and there a was that relaxed feeling in the air. This in itself should be suspicious, because only cliched mysteries start with, “It was a dark and stormy night...”.  On that beautiful Sunday morn, my mother drove me out to a remote spot in the woods by a lake.  Yes, this is where all the warning bells should be going off. There is a reason why there are so many horror movies with grisly murders that happen near lakes and in the woods.  It is really easy to “lose” a body in the woods and is not exactly easy to comb a lake.  Check off another box on the murder list.

Arriving at the destination my mother casually mentioned that the lake was recently refilled and stocked with fish.  Is there a more menacing name for a lake than Opossum Lake?  Literally, opossums play dead.  If we were in a murder mystery, the killer would play dead and then strike.  The refilled lake in some of the off shoots there are at least a dozen or more feet deep there are trees that have poke out of the water like grave markers.  It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to picture a body tied to at the base of the tree.  I am sure this is at least three more check boxes on the murder list. 

Mentioning of the concern for bodies under the water and I am reminded that fish have just been stocked.  Fish eat everything.  Any evidence of my presence would be quickly remove by nature if worse came to worse.  More items for the murder list.  How does our hero escape this dastardly plot of  mayhem?  Easy I talk my way out of it. With careful consideration and the knowledge that I was in charge of putting her in a home when she becomes old and infirm, she let me live another day.  It was a close call, or at lease it was by this account of the story.

By now, my mother is reading this and rolling her eyes.  The non murder themed sequence of events, is that it was a beautiful day and we went kayaking in the newly refilled lake, where I spent half the time worrying about tipping the kayak and drowning by being tree that was poking out of the water and her laughing at me for being ridiculous.   So, it wouldn’t have been a murder, but more of an accidental death that didn’t happen.  I am sure my mother is now wondering if she dropped me too many times as a child if a simple day of kayaking turned into an attempted murder.  

Happy Mother’s Day!