That’s me running from a bunch of angry yellow jackets.
That hadn’t happened to me in fifty years. When I was a kid my family spent our summer vacations on Lyme Rock Farm in Benson, Vermont. We spent a lot of our time fishing, swimming in Sunset Lake, and walking around the pasture. One day probably in 1957 or ’56 I was playing softball with Eddie Blais in the side yard, across the driveway from the house. He hit the ball over my head, over the berry patch, high into a tree behind me. Seconds later he was standing there laughing at me as I ran and jumped around, slapping my head like a crazy person for no reason he could see. Seconds later than that he was running and jumping around, slapping his head like a crazy person, as the wasps whose nest the ball had hit found him too.
This morning I was mowing the grass in the backyard in Newton. There were some yellow jackets flying around a leftover section of fence that’s in the middle of the yard, but I didn’t pay them any attention. Not, that is, until I bumped the mower into the fence, or mowed so close to it that I set it vibrating. There must be a nest under it, because the wasps turned nasty. I brushed a couple off my arms before I got smart enough to run away from the area. I’m sure I felt a couple of pinpricks that didn’t develop into full-fledged stings, but still three of them got me pretty well. Ouch ouch ouch!