The One Time I Earned My Spot… With a Softball

My paternal grandparents had an old country house surrounded by crop fields and woods in Ben Hill County, Georgia. Every Christmas week, Daddy, Mama, and all my aunts, uncles, and cousins would gather there.

This particular year I was about seven years old. One morning I was playing in the yard when I saw Daddy and a few of my uncles coming out of the house carrying their guns. They said they were going hunting.

Naturally, I wanted to go.

Daddy said no.I persisted anyway. That’s when one of my uncles got a bright idea.

He spotted an old softball lying in the yard next to my Papaw’s black International pickup and handed it to me. He pointed to a squirrel on the side of a pecan tree and said,“If you can hit that squirrel with this softball and kill it, you can go with us.”

The tree was probably twenty feet away—though to seven-year-old me, it might as well have been fifty yards. I wasn’t exactly known for throwing accuracy… unless you count tantrums. So nobody seemed too worried about this challenge.

I reared back and threw that softball as hard as I could in the general direction of the tree—and somehow hit that squirrel right on the back of the head.

All the men standing around let out this involuntary cheer. Nobody was more surprised than me. I still vividly remember my uncle picking up the softball and wiping the blood off of it.

Now, no—they still didn’t let me go hunting with them.

But I didn’t mind.Because I went back inside knowing I had done, at seven years old, what none of them probably could’ve done as grown men.

Story Credit: Nate