piedmont

On Memorial Day weekend we bypassed the motor boats and the barbeque and packed a picnic river lunch. We drove an hour and a half to Landsford Canal State Park on the Catawba River near Chester to finally see the famous Rocky-Shoals Spider Lilies in full bloom.

(This story is from The Point Guard, a novel-in-progress about the fictional town of Morgan, South Carolina.)

In the old days, the weekend before Christmas, we always rose early on Saturday and headed up to Aunt Nina and Uncle Tip's to get the tree. The year I was fifteen Connie's boyfriend Randy went with us. He drove Mama's car, the old Desoto, up Highway 176 past Landrum. The mountains off in North Carolina were ice blue, and the sky was almost white, with approaching clouds behind Hogback Mountain.

I've been thinking about hunting all week. Thanksgiving morning we woke up to shooting on two sides. For a half-hour or so it sounded like a Baghdad fire fight. Upstream, to our west, ducks and geese were probably falling in a series of shotgun volleys, and to the east, downstream, somebody else had mounted their tree stand to shoot a few holiday rounds at some of South Carolina's estimated 800,000 deer in the dawn's early light.