Trip to Texas- Part 2, in which we attend church and go on a bike ride

May 15, 2005

We drove to church at the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Lufkin today. Everyone at the church welcomed us cheerfully. The pastor preached about how if we are not faithful, Christ will remove the lampstand of our church (from Revelation). It was a moving sermon- especially since his own church has dwindled to maybe only twenty people. After we returned home, I overheard Aunt Lisa telling my mother that they’re very worried that their church will dissolve, and that they will be left with nowhere to worship.

After church, we took a group picture of all us kids. Brother1 was grumpy because he’d gotten rather carsick on the ride home from church. I napped for a bit and then went with Peter, Mary, and the ever-present Shayfur to the creek. We were just stopping to splash in a particularly deep, cool pool when something splashed into the creek and peppered us with sandy water. And then Andrew appeared around the curve in the creek. He throws anything to hand- sticks, sand, pebbles, etc. We joined him in seeing how big a splash we could create by throwing hard-packed balls of sand into the deep water. Even Mary joined in. Then Brother2 appeared. He tried to spear water skimmers with a stick. We were having a wonderful time getting ourselves filthy-dirty when Uncle Kirk called us up to the house for supper. One of my mother’s old friends, who lives near Nacogdoches, came over for supper. She’s an art teacher at a public school. She’s a woman with a loud laugh and a bushy, curly shock of black hair. The adults talked and talked after supper. Peter and I got bored and went outside to swing on the tire swing. We took turns pushing one another while Cypress, their other black cat (all three of their cats are black- except Shayfur, who has a white fleck on his breast and one white whisker), watched us. The dim evening crept through the woods and engulfed us in its green arms, until it was time for bed.

May 16, 2005

Yesterday, Ross and I discussed bike routes to take. This morning, he took down the bikes from the rack in the garage. He dusted them off, oiled the chains, and adjusted the seats. Then he packed three candybars, and Brother1 and I grabbed our cameras and water bottles, and all three of us soared down the steep driveway into the street on our bicycles. We flashed through their wealthy neighborhood, through stripes of light and shade from the trees, heading east, then south. We biked past a run-down house which was gradually sinking into the weeds, and a pack of doll-sized dogs ripped from behind the curtain of weeds and chased us, yammering and yapping. We pedaled faster than their short legs could go and turned onto a farm-to-market road, wheeled past the Knights of Colombus building, and turned onto a county road. The golden breast of a field rippled away on our right, like the gold leaf on a manuscript page, set in the green-penned-patterns of the trees. We rode for two and a half hours in a labyrinth of curving back roads through the east Texas woods. The toes of the trees traced down to the road, and between them grew rich spreads of wildflowers. Honeysuckle and clover breathed sweetly on the breeze. We passed a meadow clotted with creamy asters. Vultures circled lazily on the thermals, their shining wings tipping as they tilted. We crossed a creek several times, for it wound across the land like a milky green snake. We passed horses glossy with sweat, and white cattle grazing in a field, and two friendly, fuzzy-faced donkeys who came to the fence to be scratched. We nearly ran over a three-foot-long kingsnake who was crossing the road in a leisurely fashion. White cattle egrets flew sparkling from a field of black cattle, like bits of white paper torn and blown on the wind. One of the cattle had long, drooping ears that hung down over her face so that she seemed to be wearing an old-fashioned sunbonnet. We toiled up the steep hills, our gears popping like the joints of an old woman, and then flew down those hills on our way home, skeining out like wild geese. Sometimes, we rode three abreast, talking above the hum of our tire treads on the rough pavement. When we turned home, we stopped on a bridge, and Ross brought out his candy bars. When we got back on the road again, a motley crew of dogs bounded from a patch of shade and watched us pass with wagging tails and smiling mouths. A huge cow lay in another patch of shade that was as deep as water. Slender young pine trees filtered the light as though they were a pane of dirty glass. The noon sun was high overhead when we finally turned back into the straight neighborhood streets. When the bicycles were put away, I collapsed on the cool tile floor in the dining room, stretching my sunburned legs.

After lunch, we watched “National Treasure”, and then we all went down to the creek again. Ross built a lovely little waterfall, and Brother1 and I helped him to dam up the creek further down so that the girls would have water in a system of “ship yards” for miniature boats that they’d built. I discovered a floating net of frogspawn nestled under the bank, but Lillian shattered it with a carelessly-thrown stone. Suddenly, then, the water wore through our dams, and in seconds all of our work was washed away. So we all trickled up to the house, where Aunt Lisa bundled everyone off to get showers.

Ross drove Brother1, Daisy, Brother2, Andrew, and Peter to the home school hat party for supper this evening. Lillian and Annalee went to a girls’ club meeting at IHOP, and the rest of us went out for supper to an Italian food restaurant. Uncle Kirk and I both ordered chicken, which turned out to be much, much spicier than he had remembered it. We had to hurry home in time for my class on the internet, though. I spent the evening sitting in Uncle Kirk’s study, alternately chatting on the internet for the class, reading my friends’ blogs, or staring at the shelves of books. He has all sorts of books: Rush Limbaugh, John Calvin, Upton Sinclair, J.R.R. Tolkien, human anatomy dictionaries, computer handbooks, systematic theologies….

When the class was over, I emerged into the living room to find the little girls rough housing with my father. They were having a pillow fight, until Annalee threw a dirty sock. “Hey! No using biological weapons! I think it’s against the Geneva convention or something,” my father laughed. When everyone returned from the hat party, the girls decided to sleep outside in the tent that Uncle Kirk put up the first day we were here so that Peter, Brother2, and Andrew would have a place to sleep (my parents were to stay in Andrew’s room and my grandmother was to stay in Peter’s room). They actually managed to stay out there all night, though Daisy complained that Cypress and Beamer stole all her sleeping bag.