Twenty years ago, I wrote in one of my notebooks, about something that was told to me. I found it this week, as I was browsing in this particular notebook.
I was visiting my classmate Phyllis one evening, it was October 28, 1992. During our conversation, she told me about an episode that had happened to her at the age of eleven. Her family lived on a large farm, in the township of West Nicholson, and there was a swampy area across the dirt road from their house, and up about an eighth of a mile, along that road.
The family had ducks, which were let out every day to spend time finding insects and grass to eat. It was Phyllis’s daily chore to go out and call the ducks and herd them together, to bring them in for the night, and direct them into their duck coop.
One day, they weren’t listening to her, and ignored her call or couldn't hear her. She found them in the swampy area where it was moist, and kept calling them to come home. There may have been many insects keeping them busy, or they may not have heard her voice.
She went a little farther into the swampy area so she could get the ducks, to gather them together. She unknowingly went too far, into the quicksand part. She began to sink into the quicksand and started to scream for help.
She screamed and screamed while she was sinking even farther, and finally her grandfather heard her. He alerted her father, and the two men gathered some boards to cover some of the area so as to get to her without their sinking, too, and brought the horse and some rope to get Phyllis out of the quicksand.
They put the rope around her shoulders and under her armpits. She was almost up to her neck in the quicksand. The horse pulled and pulled, and finally pulled her safely out of that horrible situation.
I have no idea of whether or not she knew that there was an area of quicksand in that swampy place.
Some time later they turned that swampy area into a pond.
I'll see you at the Corner Post...
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