Saturday week ago we were on family vacation at Surfside Beach, Texas. We rented a 5 bedroom beach house that sleeps 30. That’s a lot, but if everyone was there, 28 would be piled in … at least until the next grandchild is born in October.
On the verge of cocky, we guys planned a fish fry (fish we hadn’t yet caught) Saturday night for the 18 of us there. Thank goodness it wasn’t on the keepers I caught. Gandhi ate more than that!
We fished off the jetties the first day, and my sons locked into a dozen or so speckled sea trout. They just quietly grinned like cats at a dairy farm every time I reeled in a small fish.
At the dead-end is where the fish start. The drive, in and of itself, is a mental detox.
It starts on a smooth, asphalt State road that make the tires sing a steady hum. A few miles later it becomes a seal coated Farm to Market road where the tires rumble a deep bass song at 55 miles per hour.
Four more miles and it changes to an oil top County Road. The potholes sound a boom each time a tire drops in at 35 mph. Three miles farther is a ninety degree turn and the oil top turns to gravel. At 20 to 25 mph, the tires grind gravel and sound like wheat being pulverized into flour.
At each road change, travel slows a little while the steering wheel more aggressively shakes in unison as the tires ripple over a washboard section. Continue reading Chartreuse Peace→
It’ll be dark in an hour. I jump in the pickup and start driving aimlessly in the country. After a sweltering hot day, it’s cool. With both windows rolled down, it feels like heaven on earth air conditioning.
Smells of a freshly cut grass, honey suckle patches on fence rows and the scent of distant rain clouds permeate the air. Red dust flies up behind the truck. It envelops the branches of the trees looking like a Picasso painting in the rearview mirror.
A little further down a pickup pulling a trailer is in a field being loaded with hay bales from last week’s cutting. Just past that is a house where a boy rides his bike in a big circle over and over. He finally gathers his courage to take another shot to go airborne off the ramp he made from two 5-gallon buckets and a stiff piece of plywood.
It’s the South. It’s the country. It’s rural living. It’s a culture where most folks like a slower pace of life, and not being crowded in at the gills by neighbors. Continue reading Dirt Road Drive→
Some of the best characters are real live people….and so it was at lunch time. While eating lunch in a grocery store “deli”, an old gentleman was sitting at a table staring down the aisles. He looked tired, but content.
We exchanged head nods when I sat at the table near him, which in body language means, “I see you. I acknowledge you. I’m going sit here, but we won’t talk and ruin this quiet.”
Two minutes later, a heavy set man in his late 50’s walked by and spoke to the elderly gentleman who he obviously knew.
“Hey! You gettin’ yourself a lunch here?”
The old man responded, “No. My wife’s shopping so I’m waiting.”
“Well”, the big man said, “I’s gonna get me a lunch, but the line’s long right now. I’m not real hungry anyway. I microwaved a chicken pot pie for breakfast. You’re lookin’ like you’re feelin’ better”. Continue reading Fish Story→
I posted Little Bitty Gator several days ago and, as crazy as it sounds, it’s an absolutely true post! A blogging friend, Judy at (theprojectbyjudy.wordpress.com) suggested a fictional follow-up story from the alligator’s point of view! Thanks Judy! This post is fictional…just in case you wonder… Here goes:
Weird things happened to Buck. He’s an 8 foot long, adult alligator that lives on the Texas Gulf Coast near the Louisiana border.
When he first popped out of the egg, Papa Gator immediately noticed his teeth were all messed up. All the other hatchlings had nice, straight teeth. In a fit of anger he told Mama Gator, “That buck toothed, crooked smile, cross-eyed thing can’t be my son!” Papa called him Buck from then on.
Papa and Mama Gator had it out more than once over Buck! Papa Gator accused her of going several miles over and visiting one of the Louisiana riff raff gators when Papa and some of his buddies were on vacation one week trolling for house cats in golf course ponds. Continue reading Little Bitty Human→
He’s says it was on his bucket list, but most people don’t have jumping on the back a wild alligator in water over their head on their bucket list. Yet, he did.
Two of my sons, Blake, who was 24 at the time, and Todd, who was 21, were night fishing in a Gulf Coast bayou. They noticed the red glare of eyes near their 15 foot flat bottom boat. The fish weren’t biting, so they started trolling up to and around the glaring eyes that belonged to different sizes of alligators.
Todd, we call him Einstein for short, decided he needed to bare handed catch and release an alligator, but not a ten foot or bigger one, because that would be foolish, right? And not a four foot or smaller one, because that would be too easy. Uh huh, yeah. Continue reading Little Bitty Gator→
Stories about family, faith, friends and funnies. Pull up a chair. Grab a cup of coffee and laugh, cry, ponder and inspire about ordinary events of this wonderful, ever changing, bubbling pot that we call "every day life".
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