Crawfish Story Contest- Winner!

Crawfish Story Content Winner

Thank you to everyone who entered our Crawfish Story Contest!

We had over 50 entries, with over 50 different Crawfish Stories to choose from!

We had stories of crawfish attacking, stories of falling in love while eating crawfish, stories of falling in love with crawfish, stories of cross-country trips, and stories that take place in backyards. We will be posting the stories on this blog over the next few weeks.

We had a hard time picking the best story, but in the end we picked one that tugged at the heart-strings as well as our appetite!

Here is the Winning Story:

Uncle Wilson, by Mary Pitman

Uncle Wilson was eccentric. When I was a kid he was in his 70’s. This great man and his wife Aunt Alice, practically raised my father so he and Aunt Alice were special to us. On Sunday afternoons, we would go to his house to visit. Dear Aunt Alice had a baby grand piano. She was teaching my Mom how to play. One warm, sunny afternoon in April of 1969 when I was 8 years old, we made our usual house call and Uncle Wilson was sitting in a folding chair on his porch. There were little red shells around his feet. He motioned me to come closer and when I did he handed me a small lobster like creature that he called a “mudbug”. He demonstrated how to eat this strange thing and finished by sucking on it, juice dripping down his chin. Now I was 8 years old and girls did not eat bugs. Only boys did. Uncle Wilson threw back his head and laughed; his hat flew off, landing in a pile of mudbug shells. He picked me up with fishy smelling hands and patiently explained that these ‚”bugs‚” were okay to eat. He went on to say that the common name for the creature was a crawfish. Now that was different. We ate fish all the time and if Uncle Wilson could do it then so could I. Mom and Dad went inside the house with Aunt Alice and Uncle Wilson and I pulled our chairs together and dined on a meal of mudbugs. That was 42 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday. We lost Uncle Wilson in 1993. He was 93. We never had the chance to eat those mudbugs again but I have told that story many times. I still see the juice dripping down his chin.