Pepsi Cola was a nickel a bottle and you got one cent back if you returned the bottle. We scoured the red clay ditch banks along the dirt road for cast outs.. but you found very few and like as not when you did find one, they had hit a rock and dinged the rim and were worthless. We took em to the store anyway in the hopes that whoever was working would be too busy to look real good... but it didn't matter. This was small town living....even if one got by someone, the next time I went to the store, almost as if by magic whoever was working would bring out a bottle with a dinged rim and say "this was in with the bottles you brought yesterday Jimmy....give me a penny back or go find me another bottle. Karma...I had never heard of it.....most likely no one in Southeast Virginia had ever heard of it. Heck transistor radio's, and calculators hadn't even been invented yet, and we still used an abacus at school to learn mathematics on for goodness sakes. I was close to ten years old....which as I said earlier meant I was nine years and one month old...therefore ....close to ten! I didn't realize how lucky I had been, I hadn't experienced a death in the family yet, not even the death of a pet..but I knew I didn't like death from hog killins. When you feed them all summer and they come to you when you call or whistle at them....it's a cold, cruel thing to see them killed. I never liked killing of any kind really...I found that out early. Fishing was, and is one of my favorite sports...but even today I find myself hoping they are dead when I open the cooler. When I clean Blue Crabs I dump them in ice water to quickly do the deed...I don't have any anti-hunter convictions, if you enjoy it that's your right to do it...I can't truly say where that came from...my dislike to killin....I can truly say I used to be ashamed of it....but not anymore. This is a memory brought about by the picture above...the duck was nested right up near shore under a Cypress knee..I took a couple of photo's and then tried to stalk closer in for a better one, as I always do. It let me get far too close.. and never moved. A closer look revealed it was dead, I hope it died a peaceful, natural death at a ripe old age....the same thing we all wish for.