My granddaughters are such a source of delight for me, often reenacting a scene straight out of the past when their daddies were the same age. In this photograph, Maddie has captured a large crawfish from one of the mounds near their house. Her gleeful grimace may be a touch more dainty than those I remember on the face of her Dad and his brothers, but I love hearing that Maddie and her sister Jordann have now lured their neighboring friends from the grip of Minecraft and Dora the Explorer to this sunny spot outdoors to join them in their quest to "catch critters." I am sure my son enjoyed showing them how, which is exactly what he did nearly 40 years ago! Our sons were 3, 5, and 8 when we moved to a house that backed up to a creek in Plano, Texas. They didn't have any trouble making friends once they got out their string and bacon and began fishing for the crawfish that were all along the creekbanks. In good old East Texas lingo, they called them "crawdads."
The boys enjoyed keeping one for a pet now and then. They had captured a very large crawfish which was being kept in an aquarium on our kitchen buffet. My mother came to visit and as usual, she got up earlier in the morning than any of us and slipped barefoot into the kitchen to make her first cup of coffee. She suddenly woke up the rest of the house when she started yelling because she didn't know what had invaded the kitchen floor. The boys had unwittingly caught a mama crawfish that had dozens of tiny babies clinging to her swimmerets She had crawled out of the tank, slipped onto the floor, and scattered little crawfish everywhere. Mother thought they were bugs, and indeed, in some places they are called mud bugs!
