15 Minute Marathon

One of the fun things I loved to do as a little girl was to jump rope.  One day I brought the rope into the house and proceeded to jump rope through the house.  It was kind of a skip as you jumped over the rope.  It was really fun or so I thought.  My dad had warned me to stop jumping in the house and go outside.  But unfortunately I continued to jump rope!  Dad got up, left the room, and returned with something behind his back.  He very calmly asked if I liked jumping rope.  Smiling I answered "yup"!  He slowly showed me what was behind his back, it was the strap!!  This was not any ordinary strap, it was a 25 inch piece of leather they used on the farm to drive the horses, and it was thick.  Usually mom or dad would double the strap to whack us, and it we tried to run away, they would let go of one end to catch you in mid stride.  OUCH!!!  My smile turned upside down extremely fast, as well as my eyes were as wide as the Mackinaw Bridge.  He said he was glad I liked to jump rope because I was to jump for the next 15 minutes and if I stopped, he was going to whip the living tar out of me.  He set the timer on the stove and suggested I start jumping.  Fifteen minutes is forever to a little kid, I know, I felt like my legs were going to fall off!!  But I realized he was not kidding, and calmly sat down to make sure I jumped the whole time.  It was a fairly close race between the amount of jumps I made in that 15 minutes and the amount of tears that dripped off my chubby red cheeks.  Either way, at the end of my sentence dad walked back into the kitchen to put the strap away and never said another word to me about jumping in the house.  He never had to because I never ever picked that jump rope up again, and to this day I have not ever played jump rope.  I am a fast learner the first time.  Then I became a very obedient daughter each time they asked me to do something.