Charla and I were walking in our Pennsylvania neighborhood this week and we saw a hornet's nest in a leafless tree. That reminded me of something that happened while I was growing up on the family dairy farm in Northern Vermont.
It was a cold, nose-freezing, Saturday morning in early November in the mid-to-late 1970s. It had snowed a fair amount the week before and I had gotten my snowmobile (Ski-doo) out from our summer storage area. A snowmobile, for a 13-14 year old boy growing up in this location of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom (NEK), where snow is a part of life often for 5-6 months of the year, brought a sense of freedom that I looked forward to with great anticipation.
I know it was early November because my goal this particular morning was to visit our favorite deer hunting spots on the farm in preparation for hunting season.
The farm had a large building, large enough to store most of the farm equipment over the winter. In a portion of the building was a workshop where we would bring equipment in for repair when needed. This specific morning my father had asked for some help with a repair. The machinery was in the shop and a fire in the wood stove was warming everything nice and toasty so we would have a comfortable place to work.
The Saturday routine was to get up at 5:30 a.m. and go to the barn to help with morning chores. After chores we would then go back to the house for breakfast and then start working on the Saturday's project to-do list.
The distance from the house to the farm buildings was about 150 yards and would normally take just a few minutes to walk, however, the trip on winter mornings would be about 5 miles long and would take a half hour as I explored the areas of the farm on the snowmobile.
This Saturday morning I headed to some of the fields behind the main buildings. It wasn't long before I saw a single tree in the corner of a field with a very large hornet's nest hanging from a lower branch.
Excited, I stopped and pulled the nest off the branch entirely intact. I cut the trip short and brought the trophy back to show my father and grandfather.
When I arrived at the shop, I went in and sat the nest down next to the woodstove and went looking for my father to show him the "treasure" I had found. He wasn't there, so I quickly headed back to the house looking for him. Not finding him there, I decided to check the shop area again. As I was approaching the shop, the door opened and my father and grandfather were both running out from the building. My father was yelling to me to stay away from the building. I got off the snowmobile without turning it off and ran to catch up with them. We ended up in one of the side buildings.
Both my father and grandfather were nervously speaking very fast in French, my dad had a couple welts on his neck along with a look of confusion.
After I had told my father and grandfather what I had found, there were chuckles and a little scolding. The fire in the wood stove eventually died down and the next day we were able to remove the nest. However, it took until the following spring for all of the hornets to finally be gone. Everytime we started a fire, the ones that managed to hide somewhere in the shop would come back to life and they were out for revenge!
That's a great story Uncle Larry ❤️ I look forward to hearing more of them along this new adventure. Love you guys!