Worms!!!

I was at a pumpkin patch today with my family. The weather was perfect for it, the sky was bright blue and the air had that autumn crispness to it. We were all going through a hay maze, following my 21 month old niece. We walked over a patch of large acorns and she bent down to pick a few up. I did the same and it reminded me of a craft project I completed in the 4th grade.
It was around Thanksgiving that fateful fall. We had a class competition on who could make the best turkey. We all had the same turkey cutout, made of a file folder. We were told to go home and decorate it however we wanted. In a week we would bring them back to school and they would be judged by our neighboring class. Our names were hidden underneath the turkey, so this would be an unbiased judging (see the vocabulary word there?). Well, I was really excited. I went home and started brainstorming with my mom and grandmother who lived with us at the time. It was decided that I should decorate this turkey in and appropriately fall manner, with acorns and fall leaves (not so easy to find in south FL by the way). At the end of our road was an oak tree, and I’m pretty sure it was the only one in our town. I’m not sure what kind of oak it was, but it made acorns that were longer than usual and very smooth and shiny. My grandmother and I walked to the end of the road with a bag and collected handfuls of these things, as well as the leaves that had begun to fall. We went home and glued these onto my turkey cutout. It was beautiful. We sprayed it with hairspray to give it a luster and to keep the leaves from crumbling apart. I took my turkey to school and everyone was talking about how great it looked. I was going to with this competition for sure!
Well, in south FL, the heat is cranked on in the buildings as soon as the temperature dipped below 70 degrees. Apparently some types of acorns have larva that live in them and apparently these larva like to hatch and crawl out of people’s 4th grade Thanksgiving turkeys in warm temperatures. I learned this the hard way. Pretty soon the entire class was gathered around the craft table staring and shrieking that “Ginnie’s turkey had worms.” By the time the neighboring class came over to judge the turkeys mine was sitting OUTSIDE the classroom, by our back door, next to our weather station. No Thanksgiving prize for Ginnie.
As you can probably tell, this was a tragic thing for a 10 year old little girl to have to deal with. Moral of the story…don’t make a turkey from leaves and acorns, well, leaves are OK, but keep the acorns outside.