We Broke All Seven Beds

When I was in the seventh grade my Granny Farley was operated on for a brain tumor. This was after months of chemotherapy and numerous doctor visits which kept my mom way too busy taking care of her mother and disabled brother and sister. The doctor and hospital treating Granny was over 2 hours away, so my mom was run absolutely ragged.

The weekend of the surgery my parents rented a little house behind a motel down the street from the hospital. They spent every waking moment at the hospital and Billy, Rhonda and I stayed at the little house. It was a nice little house with beds in every room - sometimes 2 of them and a tv and a kitchen. They also left us plenty of money to run to the store down the street if we wanted to.

We had a vacation. (I was 13, Billy was 11 and Rhonda was 10)

We played and we romped and we fought as any preteen children are want to do when left to their own devises. We had board games galore. I seem to remember this was when I was obsessed with commercials and I wrote down every jingle played on tv at the time. I was also a voracious reader but you can only do so much reading before you join in the merriment and mayhem that 3 kids can conjure on a weekend with no parents.

We also jumped on every bed, couch and chair in the house! It was a veritable trampoline factory as far as we were concerned! The only thing that stopped such wonderful play was the fact that we jumped on every bed in the place (all 7 of them) until we broke them. However we were masters at covering our tracks. Some of the beds we just kind of bent the legs back and they held but other we had to prop up on all sorts of building blocks that we manufactured from odds and ends in the house. We didn't care what we used as long as our parents didn't discover that we had been misbehaving when they dragged themselves back to the house to get some much needed shut-eye. They were much too concerned with my Granny's health to double check on three mischievous children.

We did pretty well covering our tracks - that is until one of the beds my dad was asleep in collapsed while he was sleeping in it. Even then when he looked under it and investigated he thought the bed had collapsed under his own weight (my dad was a hefty guy - his nickname was Cannon - if you remember the private eye from the seventies). So we still didn't get caught.

We were a might nervous when they were checking out and my dad took the key back to the office. He said he was going to report the broken bed so they could fix it before any other guests were accidentally hurt on it. We all sat in the back seat waiting for the wrath of the Gods because we thought the motel bed police would surely out us and we breathed a sigh of relief when we pulled out with no one none the wiser.

The motel police did a cursory inspection of the house when we left and since my parents made us clean the house until it was spic and span they didn't investigate other possible injuries to the furniture. Even so it was probably a year before I decided that no one would ever be none the wiser to our weekend trampoline camp.