SEA TURTLES AND EASTER EGGS

AND SALMONELLA, I guess I should have added. When I was younger so much younger than today as The Beatles once sang, we played with little turtles that we bought at Ben Franklin or Murphy's or Smith's Aquarium. We'd put them in a box of some kind, toss in some sand and grass, and pull them out once in awhile to have races or just watch them. They didn't do much, they never lived long, and no one back then told us not to handle them.

Same with Easter eggs dyed with the Paas coloring and stick on labels of the cross or bunnies or flowers. Our moms would dye up about a dozen and we'd hide them outside for over a week. It seemed like so much fun to find them again. Sometimes we'd get diverted and leave them outside overnight, but most of the eggs managed to get back into our baskets and be taken to the house until further egg hunts commenced. When one would get cracked, we saw no problem--we'd just eat it. And some of those babies lasted a couple of weeks anyway.

Why we didn't get some form of salmonella or food poisoning I'll never know. Bob Kent told me it was because we had built up a tolerance to bacteria back then, so our little stomachs didn't know any better. Bob still farms in the Midwest, and he knows about stuff like that. I guess the same principle applied to the turtles, though I never asked him about that.

Some other friends of mine from Summersville got hold of some water purifying tablets and used to add them to creek water and drink it. They didn't get sick either. And I thought Rend Lake water was bad. Wait a minute it is. I wonder where you get some of those tablets.