(Not) Into the Woods

My imagination is like a five-year-old hopped up on Kool-Aid and Frosted Flakes. That is to say, it is a little ... active.

My parents learned, when I was a child, to use this to their advantage. Take, for example, the Case of the LuLu Ladies.

When I was five, we lived in a trailer park in New Orleans. This particular community was surrounded on all sides by a wooded area. There was another girl in the trailer park who had my exact first and middle names, only she was Mei Sally R and I am Mei Sally F. Freaky coincidence? Guess what: her mom and my mom both had the same name too. What are the odds?

To this day, my mom refuses to take the blame credit for the LuLu Ladies, but I happen to remember that she is the one who told me all about them.

See, I guess some kids had disappeared into the woods or something, or maybe there was a meth lab back there, I don't know. But the important thing was, Mei R and I were not REPEAT NOT to go into the woods ever.

I know this will surprise you, but I do not respond well to commands. So my mom told me that if I went into the woods, the LuLu Ladies would get me. That is all she had to say:

"Mei Sally Flower, if you go into those woods, the LuLu Ladies are gonna getcha."

And I stayed out of those woods, boy. I did not ever even try to get close to them. Because once I heard the words LuLu Ladies, my imagination spun a picture so horrifying that I just did not want to chance being caught by them. (They come in threes, my imagination says.)

I am thirty-one years old and every time I see a group of trees, large or small, I think of the LuLu Ladies, I keep myself at a safe distance.

Because, y'all, would YOU want to be caught by this?

Well ... but if I were a better artist, and this didn't so clearly resemble one of those monsters that turns out to be a film projection that is revealed by Scooby-Doo, wouldn't you be one scared five-year-old girl?