The Delightful Child

Lemon's Mill is not a road like many of you have driven with much regularity, but its character is central to this story. It is about a lane and a half wide and has some wicked curves. The curve and hill we remember most is the one where TGP has a wreck in his Omni (TGP was never really very good at picking cars). It really was a bad Sunday afternoon for USAA, because Muv ran headfirst into a station wagon driven by a pregnant lady on the way home from church. As we were waiting for police, etc., one of the bystanders was warning approaching traffic a little ways back from the first accident. TGP came along, saw the man waving his arms and decided it was better to run the Omni up the embankment rather than over the man directing traffic. It went up and then flipped over on its roof. Muv was close enough to see his flipped car and burst out in tears, thinking Pha was hurt. Instead, inside the upside down Omni, Pha was simply gathering his pocket contents off of the roof of the car before unbuckling, dropping, then crawling out. Anyway, Lemons Mill was how we always got from Georgetown to Sleepy Hollow.

I met Kimberly at swim practice, which was at the tiny indoor pool at Georgetown College. He had just moved from Olympia, Washington and we hit it off immediately.

His first visit to Sleepy Hollow, of course, took him out Lemons Mill Rd and he loves to tell the story of that trip. Not surprisingly, my brother Dunn was doing something challenging in the middle of the back seat as we were heading home. Muv was, as usual, going 70 down Lemons Mill. Dunn's action required some response from Muv, so she took off her shoe (at least in the story, it is pointy toed and high heeled) and beat him where he sat, without turning around or slowing down. Kim took great note and decided that Muv was someone to be respected.

Life went on and unlike the picture above, Kim became much bigger than me. Perhaps to avoid the "Boy named Sue" syndrome, he became affectionately known as Red; we became BFFs. Fast forward to my junior year in high school, and one of many random gatherings around the creek. Kim, me, Soph, Karen S. and probably several others of us were at the dock. Muv's rule was that no one could swim in the creek unless she was there. An interesting rule given that she couldn't swim a stroke. On the creek, the lure of the green water was too much for almost all of us and we used the tire swing to jump in. Kim, however, resisted the temptation and sat on the dock. As usually happens when kids are doing what they shouldn't, Muv came home as we were swimming. There is no way, especially without towels, to appear dry right after being in the Elkhorn. Muv surveyed us all in our wetness and contrasted it to Red's superbly dry self. She fussed at us all pretty strongly, but declared him a "delightful child".
Some thirty years later, he still is.