Primer

What do you mean Granddaddy's moving to the hunting camp? Confused I could only look at my grandmother and shake my head. It wasn't as if my granddaddy was moving out of the house. My grandparents had been separated for years so granddaddy living in strange places was nothing out of the ordinary; but the hunting camp? I was astonished. That was an icky, dilapidated building with gapped wooden floors, a rusty old stove, a bathroom barely a step above an outhouse, and things in the cabinets that might once have been labeled eatable but were currently biohazards. We had to move my grandfather into that? Despite my vigorous protest, the moving began.

First we had to fix the place up before we could move in his belongings. Every day for weeks I arrived after school armed with Clorox and rubber gloves to scrub, scrape, paint, and repair years of neglect of that old building. The day we decided to prime the room for painting was cold, gray and rainy. The building was drafty and the only heat was from a wood burning stove.

I arrived at the house that afternoon, dreading another day of boring repair jobs only to find my uncles had several rooms primed and were finishing up the main room. As I walked through the door I heard an odd noise that sounded, suspiciously, like giggling. I shook my head in confusion. That couldn't be coming from my uncles; they are 6'5"_ giants whose seriousness weighs more than I do.

As I looked in the room my uncles were sitting on the floor helpless from a serious case of the giggles. My grandmother was standing to one side of the room shaking her head in dismay.

Apparently my uncles had purchased a primer for the room that had a very strong odor. This odor combined with an unventilated house and the inferno created by the wood burning stove equaled the perfect recipe for goofiness. We would start laughing for no reason and continue for 15 to 20 minutes at the time. Even the suspicious brown stuff in the jelly jars couldn't drive away our new found humor. And when we figured out that the "wine-smelling" substance used to be jelly we laughed that much harder. Of course my grandmother was embarrassed and insisted that we stop, take a break and eat something, I guess because food makes everything better. She took the jelly away before any of us could dare the others to try it and was not amused by the situation. How she escaped the giggles I don't know.

I learned that day that mishaps are not always a bad thing and sometimes you need to laugh about situations. Our laughter was unintentional and we all had terrible headaches from the primer, but it was worth it. My uncles steadfastly deny this incident ever occurred, but, I know better.