Summer is Time for Adventure

Today as I was walking by the stream I noticed something moving. Turns out that we have a crayfish living in our waterway, and he was rather large. It also turns out that he was very much stuck in a length of string that he wrapped around himself. Crayfish aren't the brightest like that. Kind of like the dimwit that would put string into a stream to begin with. This facilitated a rescue but instead of calling the Wonder Pets I called Josh, because every 11 year old boy would love to be in on the danger end of a wild animal rescue. We cut string and more string and were finally able to lift him out of the water to carefully unwind him. For pay, that one-armed bugger pinched me. I learned today that the claw of a crayfish has teeth-like things in the ends to slice into their prey and hold on. Darn, that thing hurt. It drew blood. With just one pincher.

My finger still hurts. It's probably infected from the thing that lives in dirty water and created an open wound.

The big kids went to the farm to unload hay for Pappy. Funny how they find that job to be a privilege when I would have seriously contemplated cutting off my own right arm to get out of it as a kid. Micah wanted to go along with them, so Daddy humored him with a walk across the road. When I went to join them, I found Micah in Pappy's office. Pappy used to milk dairy cows back in the day. That day ended fourteen years ago when he had a hip replacement. His office has sat untouched in the front corner of the barn for the past decade and a half. Cobwebs and dust have settled on everything, making it look very much like a scene Indiana Jones would stumble upon in an underground passageway. Micah was pretending to be Indy himself. He found a framed certificate of recognition sitting on the desk, and scraped away at the grime until he saw letters. You would think he had found the Holy Grail the way his face lit up. He sat and scraped at that framed treasure for the longest time, marveling at each new letter that he was able to expose. I sat and watched him scrape in fascination, marveling at how kids find the greatest treasures in the simplest things.

We loaded into the truck - Micah, Sam and I - and drove to the quarry for several tons of limestone dust. Micah was not a happy camper, being pulled away from his treasure the way he was, but one look at the super sized loader coming at our truck was enough to flip his attitude switch. That loader was the stuff that little boys' dreams are made of, and it was right there, right beside us, dumping dirty stuff into our truck. Wow. Just wow. If he could talk, he would have been saying, "did you SEE that?!"

We did. We saw our boy being a very normal little boy today. There are so many days that an extra chromosome makes zero difference whatsoever. Today was one of them.