NOTHING!..... I KNOW NOTHING!!!

There we were — caught right in that razor-thin space between doing what our moms told us not to do and actually listening to them, skating the edge just to see what we could get away with.

Before I get to the meat of this story, I need to give you a little family background to set things up right. I've asked my cousins about using their names, so you're just going to have to bear with me on that one.

Now, my grandpa — whom I've already told you about — was what folks used to call a tenant farmer. The Little family was once one of the largest landowners in greater Anson County, here in North Carolina, in what is now split into Union, Stanly, Anson, and Cabarrus Counties. That all changed with the Great Depression. They had most of their funds and land tied up in the banks, and when the banks crashed, they lost nearly everything. After that, my grandpa's family worked for another farm owner, living right there on the property — that's where the term "tenant farmer" came from.

Now, farm owners back then generally looked down on tenant farmers as lower class, and they'd often tell their daughters to stay away from those Little boys. Well, as chance would have it, my grandma didn't listen to her daddy. And neither did her sister — and that's exactly where this story really begins.

So let me make sure you're straight on this, because if you get lost here, you'll be lost the rest of the way:

Two brothers married two sisters.

They each had one boy, born just months apart. That makes my dad and Buddy what folks call Double First Cousins — raised so close together they were more like brothers than cousins.

Now, my dad met my mother late in his teens and they started planning a wedding. My mother had a younger sister, and — you guessed it — my dad introduced his cousin and best friend to my mom's little sister, and before long they were planning a wedding too.

So here's where we stand: two Double First Cousins married two sisters. Buddy and Elaine had three boys. Mom and Dad had Kathi, me, and my brother. Now follow this if you can — Buddy and Dad are Double First Cousins, which makes Buddy and me Double Second Cousins, my dad and Buddy's sons Double Second Cousins, and Buddy's boys and me Double Third Cousins. On top of all that, Buddy is my Double Second Cousin on my dad's side and my uncle on my mom's side — and Buddy's boys are my Double Thirds and my First Cousins. Whew.

I know that was a lot — but it was the only way to explain how Buddy's two oldest boys and I were about as close as three boys could be without being triplets. We lived just through the woods, maybe an eighth of a mile apart, and we were always together — and usually in trouble.

Now, Uncle Buddy ran a small pantyhose mill right behind his house, and as luck would have it, my mom worked for him alongside my Aunt Elaine. You can probably see where this is going. That left us three boys running wild around the farm, getting into one thing after another, pulling our moms away from their work to come correct us — then doing it all over again.

After enough of that, they'd had it. That week, we were banished to the little playhouse Uncle Buddy had built for us, conveniently located right next to the dog lot — and just as conveniently, right in eyesight of the window where our mothers could keep watch. At least, that was the idea.

The playhouse wasn't much — roughly 8x8, sitting about three feet off the ground on four poles. They did let us wrap black plastic around the bottom poles, so we had ourselves an upstairs and a downstairs. Then came The Rule — delivered more as a threat than a guideline:

"You boys are to stay in this playhouse. Do not leave it for any reason. Unless you are bleeding to death, you better not set one foot outside of it — period."

I'll leave what they said would happen if we disobeyed to your imagination.

For a couple of days, by all accounts, we followed their rules perfectly. Well... almost perfectly.

You see, my cousins had two Husky dogs — Friski and Peanut — and they lived in the dog lot about eight to ten feet outside our containment area. One afternoon, my mom glanced out the window and saw something that just didn't look right. There we were, all three of us leaning out of the upstairs windows — but so were Friski and Peanut.

That lit my momma up something fierce. For those dogs to be in the playhouse with us, somebody had to have left the playhouse, walked around to the other side of the dog lot, opened the gate, and let them out. Here she came with my aunt to — let's say — administer justice. But when they reached the gate, it was locked. We could have closed it behind us, sure, but we were swearing up and down that we never stepped outside that playhouse. Not once.

That just made them madder. They were sure we were lying.

What they'd soon find out was — we were telling the absolute truth.

We never took a single step outside that playhouse. We tunneled underground.

At the time, one of the most popular shows on television was Hogan's Heroes — POWs held captive in Germany, and one of their signature moves was digging tunnels, including one that came up right inside the guard dogs' lot. That's exactly what we had done. For three days, we had dug a tunnel from the downstairs of the playhouse into the dog lot. Then we spent the better part of an hour coaxing Friski and Peanut through that narrow tunnel and back into the playhouse with us.

Somehow, the whole thing shifted from us disobeying our mothers to them being genuinely worried we were going to get ourselves killed crawling around underground. We didn't get a whooping that day.

But little did they know — that tunnel lit a fire in us for digging, and those are stories for another day.

Thank you for your time, and as always, take a minute to check out our soaps in the store. Doesn't cost you a thing to look — and do yourself a favor and take a kid to church.

Thank you, and God Bless.

— Robert (Big PaPaw)