THURSDAY JUNE 19
We bought peaches at the fruit stand in town Thursday afternoon, but they weren’t really ready. If we’d wanted the perfect peaches and had a day or two to blow, we would’ve gone down to Peach Park in Clanton, Alabama, because that’s where all your previous feelings about peaches go to die and be reborn as your new obsession with peaches, and peach ice cream, and pecans. I won’t lie and say that Peach Park isn’t also a little bit of tourist trap, but fuck you if you just drove all the way down to Alabama and still feel like you’re above a touristy peach farm.
/unrelated peach rant
FRIDAY, JUNE 20
For Megan’s birthday on Friday we took her to the local barbershop for a mohawk trim, then drove around in the country and found her some donkeys and creek rocks. It was the first birthday she’d spent without her immediate family and I was worried she’d miss this too much.
“It looks like it might birthday rain! It’s pretty birthday dark over there.” — Birthday Megan
If you keep driving past my parents’ house and on into the trees, you’ll eventually end up on a highway that’ll take you back into town. But before that, the road does a few dips and curves and spits you out on top of Rockhouse Creek. Here you’ll hang a right and coast straight into a canopy of trees. They’re a secret, and the best reason to take the long way around.
Birthday Donkeysâ„¢
At first I said, “Let’s skip rocks!” because skipping rocks sounds like a fun thing to do, until I remember that I’m actually terrible at it.
Megan started small and eventually moved up to skipping rocks the size of my head and I was reminded again that she is indeed a keeper. While she took to skipping everything that wasn’t nailed down, I took to collecting. I found a thumb rock (a small, flat-ish rock with a smooth indention the approximate size of one’s thumb, duh), a slate rock that looked like a greyhound, a rock with a million compressed layers of varying colors, a giant rock that looked prettier when it was wet, and at least eight others I can’t remember in detail. They’re on my mom’s coffee table in her living room, which I can assure you is the last place she wants to see a pile of rocks. Maybe she’ll mail them to me.
Maybe my mother will mail me a box of rocks.
It’s very difficult to photograph lightning bugs with a phone — impossible even — but that didn’t stop her from trying.
We were running out of time for barbecue and plates of salted and peppered tomato slices, so it was decided that Saturday would be the day to make this happen.
