Carol Ann Bell

In her last weeks, Carol (my Mom) shared some of the stories from her childhood. These stories seemed to bring her out of her deep sleep, allowing her to rouse and regale her friends with them. Here's one of those stories in Carol's own words— part of her Storyworth memoir that she started working on with me: Living in a small town—Lake Geneva, Wisconsin—I remember having lots of freedom. I had a lot of good times. My best friends, Sally and Sue Dickerson, lived on a farm. On the farm we had a lot of adventures. One time we did something really stupid. We tormented the bull. I don’t know what got into us.  The Dickersons had a really long back yard, and it went down a hill. In the winter we could go down that hill on skis. At the very bottom of the hill was a fence. On the other side of the fence was a big pasture with a bull in it.  On this particular day we started yelling at the bull through the fence, trying to get its attention.. Sue threw a dirt clod at it. We were just messing around, like kids. All of a sudden the bull got very irritated and started charging towards the fence.  We turned tail and we ran up that hill so fast I don’t even think our feet touched the ground. Behind us, we could hear the bull. We were running up the hill when it tore through the fence and now it was charging up the hill after us. We could hear it coming. At the top of the hill, we raced across the back yard and high-tallied it towards the house. We got to the door of the basement, tumbled through in a panic, and slammed the door shut.  It wasn’t until we were safe in the basement that we peered through the window and saw the bull tearing around the yard, breaking up the wooden lawn furniture. That bull was furious. Once we saw what it was doing to the yard, we knew we needed to disappear.  We didn’t need to hear from the adults. We knew that this was probably the worst thing we’d ever done. Now that we were safe from the bull, we were terrified that we would be murdered if anyone found out what we did. We didn’t peek out again to see what was happening. We wanted to be as far from the scene of the crime as possible.  We had crossed the line with the bull and we knew it. We were just kids—we never expected the bull to get that upset. Eventually, some of the farm hands got the bull back into the pasture and repaired the fence. Oh boy did we know we had done something really bad.