Letter from Lance - April 2010
And now the weather is perfect. I’m up at 5:30 am, get a cup of good coffee and step out onto the patio barefoot and in shorts. The temp is 68. Our high today will be 74. The clouds are on the deck and there’s rain around. It’s sweet.
I had to put new shocks on my truck Saturday and so I needed a road test and hit the back roads on Sunday. Leslie was in a gardening mood, so I did a solo run to Bishop, population 3,003. It’s about 40 miles south of here. I love being in little towns early on Sunday morning – it is incredibly peaceful. Only a dog barking breaks the silence. And the only other car on the road is heading for church and soon parked- and I’m the only one slowly cruising the sleepy streets. Bishop was actually laid out in an orderly fashion in 1910 by a promoter. Kinda strange story for an old Texas town. The downtown area is about four blocks and nearly all of it is boarded up and abandoned. The biggest biz there is tractor supply outfit, which figures. The town is split by the train tracks but both sides have the same kind of look. It’s like Mayberry on some blocks as the trees and landscaping are lush, and you can tell the people who have lived there for 40 years have spent a lot of time fixing up the yard planting trees and flowers, painting everything to the max and making their little spot perfect. Down the street is the bad kitty. Funky clapboard houses with no paint and a muddy driveway – this guy does not give a damn – with junk thrown around front and back. Usually there’s at least three or four old lawn mowers, maybe an old rusty truck, a water heater and three burnt out bar-b-q drums next to the driveway. And every block has that special perfect house, and usually three or four vacant lots which I love, and at least several tobacco road masterpieces all on the same mail route. Lots of vacant buildings and old garages are scattered throughout the neighborhoods, too – lots of places to play hide and seek. What I also love is driving to the edge of town, maybe 10 blocks, and there you see a nice little house and notice his back yard has no fence and goes on quite a ways as there’s nothing but open farm land for as far you can see behind him. Way cool. The schools have the only new buildings. A teeny grocery store and a little bakery is about all you get for supper. They don’t even have a Dairy Queen, a Texas fixture in most small towns. I also think the radio and television signals in big cities affect us all negatively. And that’s another reason I relate a peaceful feeling to small towns, like Bishop, which have no radio or tv stations. The train came by as I was leaving. It was the engine of growth in years past and still something so vital to Texas. You can pull a lot of cars – I counted over a hundred – with just two locomotives here on the flat, south Texas coast.
Another beautiful story,Lance!
Which warms body and soul, because the weather in Holland is freezing cold (3-10 degrees) and it rains…it rains..
— annelize May 12, 03:52 AM #