Wednesday, February 11, 2015

February 10, 2015 Sesquicentennial State Park: The Winter Blues

Sesquicentennial was built 150 years after the founding of the city of Columbia.  The terrain of this northern part of the city is sand hills.  There is even a new mall over this way called Sand Hills Mall.  The ground is white and black sand like the bottom of the sea where the sea used to be.  Pines are predominant.  The park has a lake owned by a big flock of Canadian Geese.  They also overnight on a little island in the center. They are so tame, they will jump up on your picnic table while you are eating.

I take the trail around the lake.  The temperature is 49 degrees but it feels much colder as the wind is pushing wet waves across the water surface relentlessly.

My grandparents had a farm in the sand hills north of here. We would go down home, down country or to Mama and Pappa's most Sunday afternoons.  My cousins and brother and sister and I would drive the old pickup down logging trails through a forest just like this one.  The little ones were in the bed in the back.  The adults would be in the house in this kind of weather, gathering around the dining table eating little biscuits with cured ham (some call it Virginia ham) and sometimes old fashioned banana pudding with meringue on top.

They raised pigs and we would go out to the smokehouse and see the salted hams hanging curing in the dark.
Now and then the pigs would get out of their pen and chase us.  We ran in terror. They seemed to us as children to be huge thousand pounders.  Inside the warm house, the adults would laugh and say, "Oh, they won't hurt  you" and turn back to their conversations.

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