by Linda Ibbitson Hurd
Special to The Express
In the Summer of 1960 when I was 13, I spent a lot of time with my best friend. We were the same age, and both named Linda. She was the youngest of six siblings and I was the oldest of four. We lived in Hanson, I on upper Elm Street and she down the end where it went into Halifax. She and her sister had the choice of attending school in Hanson or Halifax as the town line went through the middle of their house. They chose Hanson. The house, a big two-story old Colonial, was on a beautiful plot of land where there was also a barn with a second story which housed a wrought iron workshop where her grandfather worked and a kennel for Golden Retrievers attached to the rear of the house.
One particular Saturday night when I had been invited for the weekend, Linda and I were having supper with three of her sisters, her brother-in-law, their small daughter and Linda’s parents and grandfather. The conversation turned to a situation the married sister and her husband were going through. From the beginning of Summer when their vegetable garden started producing, they found some missing when they got up in the morning along with shoe tracks in the garden soil. Then one morning they found a few items missing from their barn, which was a good distance from the street but right beside the house. They lived down the end of Elm Street near Hudson Street and not too far from Linda’s house. Their garden was in their side yard not far from the street. The Police were investigating.
When supper was over, Linda and I helped watch her two-year-old niece until her parents took her home. After they left and everyone headed for the TV set, we went outside to walk around until her mother called us in, saying it was time for bed. With lights off in every room and the house so quiet, we stayed up talking for a while in whispers. We were sitting on her bed when she looked at me and said, “Let’s go catch that burglar!” “How’re we going to do that without waking everybody up?”, I asked. “I’ll show you,” she said.
We dressed in dark colors, took the sheets off the two beds in her room, tied them together then put them around the bed post closest to the window and took out the screen. She dropped the sheets down, only a few feet from the ground and we climbed out. We moved quickly to the road before anyone could see us and hoped her grandfather wasn’t up. It was a beautiful, still, summer night and the moon wasn’t quite full. We walked the distance to her sister’s house. The garden was full except for the bare spots where things had been taken and the lettuce and squash were closest and rather large. Linda whispered, “lie down between the rows of lettuce and don’t make a sound!” As we crouched to lie down in the dirt between the rows of lettuce, she stepped on a dry twig which snapped, making a louder than usual sound in the stillness of the night. In the dirt we were lying flat with her nails dug into my thigh when she whispered, “don’t even breathe”. All of a sudden, the back door slammed open under the overhead light and her brother-in-law Ray stepped out with a shotgun bellowing, “Who’s there!?” A shot rang out and we could hear it whizzing over our heads. Before another shot was fired, Linda stoop up screaming, “Ray, it’s us, me and Linda, don’t shoot!!” He made an anguished sound and broke the shot gun in half over his thigh, yelling, “Get in here right now, both of you!”
In we shuffled, heads down and were ordered into the spacious living room with wide speckled gray floorboards. We sat and awaited our fate. We got the third degree and answered all their questions. Ray was shaking and his wife Florence was sheet white. “Do you know I could have killed you, what were you thinking?!!! “That we wanted to catch your burglar”, Linda said. He looked at me waiting for an answer “I wanted to help”, I said. He put his head in his hands. After almost an hour and all the lecturing, he looked at Linda and said, “I’ll take you home and talk to your mother.” He looked at me and said, “You call your father right now!” Oh my God, I thought, I’m dead. I didn’t want to do it but I knew there was no way out of it. Linda argued for me but both Ray and Florence were adamant. I called my dad.
When my dad came and talked to Ray and Florence and we headed for home, he was very calm and never said a word. I could sense he wasn’t mad, not even lecturing me. I was relieved. The drive home was barely two minutes, we weren’t far from where they lived. My mom met us at the door, intensely upset chiding, “Do you realize a policeman could be carrying you home dead in his arms? do you know that!?” I looked at her and said, “well, he isn’t and I’m not”. “Go to your room!!” She shrilled. I went.
Linda and I weren’t allowed to get together for a while, we knew things had to cool down first. We both realized we were wrong and learned the valuable lessons of noninterference, that well-meaning intentions can go terribly wrong, and consequen-ces can be irreversible. These have held us in good stead.

That’s how Kingston’s Sienna Harrington described her recent trip to Missouri earlier this month, which culminated with her U14 Girls’ South Shore Select Soccer Club team winning the national championship.
“It feels surreal and exciting because the skill level and competitiveness of the other teams from all over the country we were going against were so good,” Harrington said. “They were very physical and fast paced games. Every player on the Select 09 GA team worked so hard all year to get to where we are and am so proud of everyone.”
Harrington’s club kicked off the July 6-9 trip with a 1-0 victory over the South Carolina Surf SC. It then beat the Philadelphia Ukrainian Nationals, 2-1, to earn a spot in the finals. It was there where the South Shore Select doubled up TopHat, 2-1, for the crown.
“The excitement of beating some of the top-ranked teams in the country and advancing from game to game until we were national champions was definitely a highlight,” Harrington said. “Especially because we came from behind and won our last two games, 2-1, in the second half of the game.”
Her favorite memory?
“[It] was when I was on the field and the whistle blew during the championship game,” she said. “Our whole team was celebrating on the field and the Select 06 team that was watching came running out on the field too.”
Harrington, an incoming freshman at Silver Lake, has now shifted her focus to the high school pitch.
“I’m going to spend the next six weeks continuing to work on my speed and agility to prepare for high school tryouts at the end of August,” she said.
~ Nate Rollins