This story I wasn't sure I wanted to ever tell. But I figured I"m older now, water under the bridge.

When my youngest sister, Isabelle, was four, I convinced her to stick a fork in the light socket (plug). I don't know what compelled me to do this to her. I was at an age when things seemed impossible, such as how does this 'electricity' stuff flow from a cord into a lamp? I couldn't see anything from staring at the wall outlet. It didn't make any sense (nor things like how birds could fly or why the sky was blue or where babies came from).

I was a curious child. I liked to understand things and asked a lot of incessant questions, often grating on my mother's nerves. She would start by answering them patiently, but me, seeing an opportunity, knew only that I had a few minutes to get in as many questions as I could before she'd get mad and tell me to stop asking so many questions. I didn't understand, as a child, that I had plenty of time to ask them and spreading them out would be less annoying and long term I'd get more answered. My inclination was to sense a need and get it fulfilled as quickly as possible.

And oh I had SO many questions, you dears. I wanted to know how music came from the piano, where chicken came from, how come we could eat some plants but not others (including the lovely geraniums my mother grew)? Where did our cat Sparky go when one day he just didn't come home? Did Mother and Father love me? What is God? And so on, endlessly.

I wasn't much into engineering or electronics back then, but I never could understand how flipping on a switch could flood a room with light! Where it come from? What was this 'juice' that went into the cord and made things work? Why weren't the outlets full of sparks like I'd seen on the ships at dock?

So I decided to make my little sister check it out. We'd always been told not to stick things into the outlet, so at first I convinced her to stick her fingers in. Nothing. Next I tried to get her to stick her tongue, but she wouldn't go for that (thank Heavens!) But then I came up with the brilliant idea to stick a spoon, only it was too big. I came running back with a big fork, and together we pulled the tine so that one prong stuck up alone.

I pressed her to put it inside the socket. And she did. And she was zapped. She dropped it immdiately the first time and said she had a funny tingling her in arm. So of course I told her to do it again. She did and dropped it again. But she was giggling. So I tried it.

Just then Mother happened to walk through the door and saw what we were up to, and screamed bloody murder. We droppd the fork and sat there, cowering.

We didn't dessert for a week as punishment. Luckily, though, my sister never told on me that I made her do it. For that I was always grateful especially after my Mother had calmed down and explained that we could die and go to Heaven, like our cat Sparky had, and we cried at the thought of never seeing each other again, hugged and never stuck a fork or anything else into the socket again.