Hill Country Living
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
Our recent late spring weather has been absolutely glorious but peak summer life is already in full swing among the teenager set. Driving around in vehicles stuffed to the brim with ever-changing combinations of kids looking for places where everyone can swim is clearly their constant pursuit. I imagine they would have made A’s in Geography if the assignment was “Take this map and find a pool in this county.” These kids know every spot in town with a bucket and garden hose. They’ve found every knee-deep mud puddle in Yalobusha.
I find this pool and pond mission puzzling, though, considering we have a massive public lake only ten minutes away. Either way, they all look like beach-bound clowns stuffed in clown cars if clown cars were giant pick-up trucks and the clowns wore mirrored sunglasses and baseball caps instead of wigs and red noses.
Another summer pursuit they seem to take to extremes is the drinking of giant to-go soft drinks from various fast food joints and gas stations. On any given day, one may find huge Styrofoam Sonic drink cups in many rooms of my house. Some drink cups are from Sprint-mart or Subway and some may even come from as far away as Chic-Fil-A in Oxford. The various daily paths of all these kids can be traced by drink cup alone. They better never commit a crime because a detective would have a field day with all the circumstantial and direct evidence they leave behind in the form of a drink cup. Sometimes I can tell which random kid has been at my home simply by observing which giant drink was left on my kitchen counter.
One can fit a gallon or two of liquids in these cups. I occasionally use them to water yard plants. And the kids are apparently not concerned with the sea turtles because there are giant red straws poking up somewhere in my line of vision no matter where I look around my house/porch/yard/car. I’m haunted by Sonic drink straws.
I guess these kids are just in constant pursuit of full-body hydration, both inside and out. I’m not sure what they’re going to do once it gets really hot in a few weeks. Maybe they’re entering a new life cycle phase where they will become entirely aquatic. I don’t know yet as I’ve never had teenagers before so these phases are all new to me. But I won’t be surprised if, within the next few weeks, they develop webbed toes.
The kid old enough to work has a summer job starting up so I imagine he’ll wind up staying human. The 12-year-old though — he’s on the path to going full mermaid. I naively suggested that he consider reading a book this summer to off-set some of his swimming time and he scoffed at me like he was the Dowager Countess Crawley from Downton Abbey. He picked up his wet towel and headed out the door.
I hope that everyone had a lovely Memorial Day weekend and I hope that everyone who wanted to swim got to swim. If you didn’t then, rest assured, the kids in this town are trying to swim enough for all of us.
