The Humorous World Of Author
Patrick F. McManus

April means pranks, rain and taxes. They don’t give us a lot to look forward to this month do they? Still, once the crocuses bloom, none of those things seem to matter.

 

Of course, once the flowers come back to life, so do the bugs. We've already seen a couple of the hardier ones flying around outside. Even though we look forward to seeing the bumble bees, butterflies, and lady bugs again, we can’t say the same about the rest of the insect world. 

 

The worst of all bugs, in our opinion, is spiders. We McManus girls are terrified of them. One time while camping on Mosquito Bay, we thought Dad was a goner thanks to an encounter he had with a monster spider inside the tent he was attempting to set up. We reminisce about that trip often and Dad even wrote about it in the story, “Mosquito Bay” in his book, “How I Got This Way”.

 

Here's an excerpt:

 

. . . “Oh, that road into Mosquito Bay!” exclaimed my daughter, Kelly. “I wouldn’t have been so scared if Dad hadn’t been so frenzied. When he ripped off the muffler on those rocks, that was the first time I ever knew there were so many bad words.”

 

Clearly, Kelly was remembering some other road on some other camping trip with someone else’s father. Muffler indeed! Anyway, we unloaded the station wagon, and I quickly and efficiently erected our interior-frame umbrella tent, one of those with the weird contraption known as the “spider,” and rightly so. As soon as the tent was. . .

 

“Yeah,” said Peggy. “That’s the time Dad got tangled up inside the tent and screamed out, “Help! The spider’s got me by the throat!” And we all thought he meant a real spider and took off running for our lives.

 

The girls all found this recollection highly amusing. I less so. I recall that I quickly erected the tent, but when I emerged, everyone had vanished, except for Bun, who was standing behind a tree with a club in hand.

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NEW FOR APRIL

 

Pat shares his epic April Fools' Day fail in Once Again, The Joke's On Me, in Pat's Yarns.

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Kelly's back this month with her latest essay, Foraged Feasts, where she recalls the good, the bad, and the possibly poisonous foods we ate back when hunting for our meals was more of a necessity than a trendy pastime. 

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Bun explains our family's April traditions, including the highly competitive family Easter Egg Hunt that took place each year on our property in North Idaho. Dad spent all of March developing a list of complex clues designed to direct us to the strategically hidden eggs.  Those hunts could last for hours because the eggs were so hard to find. Some of Dad's clues actually required us to use tools like shovels, fishing line, and even a telescope to find the eggs. We never did manage to find them all. We'd eventually give up and go inside for Easter dinner.