Cattails

*Day 251*


The house we lived in when we were kids had a canal behind it. We would play back there sometimes. Along the banks of the canal cattails would grow. (We always called them hot dogs.) We would pick the cattails and play with them. We would go camping and make pretend fires (or maybe sometimes real ones) and roast our "hot dogs" over them. Then we would open them and watch the puff float away.

One year, we had this brilliant idea. We decided that for mother's day we would make a pillow for my mom. We thought that these cattails would make the perfect stuffing. Well, after a while, they get old and they break open and the puff floats away. I guess we'd watched this happen several years, so we knew we had to pick the cattails before the puff floated away. So we picked a whole bunch and hid them in the closet in our bedroom. One day my walked into our bedroom into storm of cattail puff. We failed to realize that they would still go to seed inside our house. My mom never got that soft cattail pillow.