Another American Adventure: Cookout at Jimmy's House

Monday, May 28, 2012

Cookout at Jimmy's House

FA finally arrived and we heard that cousins were invited to a cookout at cousin Jimmy's house. We were pretty hungry so we found our way to his lovely home and were just in time for hamburgers around the pool. Mary Lou, Minnie and Merci had driven 16 hours straight from NY so I couldn't complain about my 7 1/2 hours from Pittsburgh.

I saw lightning bugs for the first time in a long time, which left me wondering if they only have lightning bugs in KY. I don't remember seeing them other places. Minnie and Merci caught some and put them in a jar (with holes in the top, of course, so that the bugs can breathe) just like we used to do when we were children.

1 comment:

BarbaraMay 29, 2012 at 11:31 PM
I remember the lightening bugs in my childhood home on Staten Island. They are magical. I sometimes see them here in Canada, but not so often.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.