Nice Memories

I really like Reedy Creek Park. It's not quite the same place it was when Carole and I were young parents, but it has seen few changes since those times. We spent many, many days in this park when our son (Andy) was very young. It had (and still has) great playgrounds. Plus wide grassy fields, several lakes, miles of trails, and even things like historical ruins of old farmhouses from the early 1800s, a nature museum, grills, picnic pavilions, and lots of forests and streams. It's pretty darned big as county parks go--almost 800 acres. So there's plenty of room to spread out and roam.

Every now and again I like to stop by the old park and have a look around. Sometimes the memories are nice and make me happy. And sometimes the memories are sweet, but make me terribly sad.

Violets in the forest loam.

Redbuds bursting out.

A little stray azalea just getting ready to unfurl.

  

 The main lake at Reedy Creek where we would take Andy when he was a little boy.

The big field where Carole, and Andy, and I would lay out a blanket and have a picnic in the grass on a nice day like this one. Sometimes there would be people flying kites, or dogs playing, and other families with their kids, too.

Telephoto shot from across the lake. Carole and I would always stop to rest at that bench on our two or three-mile hike through the park. It was (and still is, I suppose) a great place to rest and listen to the wind.

Spring is here. Life goes on.

Where my tiny family and I spent many and many a day.

Sunday Stroll at Reedy Creek Park

Saturday night the hospital called and asked Carole to come in to scrub for a C-section as they were short-handed. So she got dressed and went in. She came back home at about 3:00 am. Then they called her on Sunday and asked her to fill in at the maternity ward for six hours, so she did that. But she was so tired that she asked me to drive her to work. I did that, but decided to take my camera and go for a short hike at Reedy Creek Park on the way back to the house.

Reedy Creek Park is a pretty cool place, but I generally avoid it during warm months because of the thick crowds that take advantage of the picnic grounds and the lake fishing and biking trails. I go there to hike, since there's a pretty darned good system of woodland trails in the park. It's also a fairly large park--over 700 acres. I can almost get a feeling of wilderness and solitude if I can hit a day when there aren't many people (and dogs) in there.

Today was a Sunday, which would generally make it a crowd day. But the temperatures were in the high 40s so there weren't any picnickers in the park. Mainly there were just people playing disc golf and a fair number of hikers like myself. It wasn't too bad.

I've posted some columns about the park before. One of my favorite spots there are the ruins of an old farmhouse that has fallen to rocky bits. There are a couple of genuinely creepy ghost stories about the place, one of which I keep meaning to use as the basis for a short story or novella. It's percolating.

This is the site of the old farmhouse. This was the house of the son of the couple who originally owned most of the acreage. There's a ghost story attached to this place that genuinely scared me when I read of it. Not the ghost itself...I don't believe in such. But what happened to the person whose ghost apparently haunted the vicinity because of what happened to her.

This corner of the house was reassembled by the County some years ago. They pieced the stones back together. In fact, the house was completely in bits before they decided to cement some of it to its original state to give a better idea of the scope of the old place. It wasn't a huge house, but wasn't insubstantial, either.

The cursed farmhouse from the opposite side from where you arrive by way of the Sierra Loop Trail.

When things are just right, you can pretend you're really in the woods.

A Wade in the Park

One thing about Reedy Creek Park is that it's so large that you can actually get away from the sounds of gas and diesel engines. With one exception: jets and propeller planes. I was down in the creek taking a video of the water and it was pretty peaceful and quiet except for the drone of a prop plane fading in the distance.

I've been told that there is gold to be found in the creeks here. I need to go back one day with a pan and see what I can find.

Osage Can You See

I took this stitched photo on my hike last week. Wherein I got jumped by about a dozen chiggers. Suffered for days with those burrowing, itchy bastards. Healing up now, but it'll teach me to hike trails in the Piedmont in summer without my DEET spray.

I was told by Ed Frank that this may have been a particularly large Osage orange tree. I need to go back out to the park with a tape measure so that I can give the figures to Ed. From what I've since read this tree was likely in the upper echelons of its species. Too bad it was done in by an ice storm.

Reedy Creek Hike

To take a break from the novel work I drove a few miles away from the house and went for a hike in Reedy Creek Park. It's a very large (almost 800 acres) park here in Mecklenburg County. I used to hike there a lot when I lived in that area, but I rarely go there anymore. I wanted to hike to a certain spot where there's an old farmhouse ruin and just get away for a couple of hours.

The park wasn't as crowded as I'd feared, perhaps due to the heat. And I ended up having the trails all to myself which was very surprising. At any rate, here are a few photos I took while on the trails in the park.

This is an old Osage orange tree that fell to the ground during an ice storm in 1987. It was cored and revealed to have been planted beside the farmhouse roughly around 1770. Even lying on the ground it's an impressive sight.

The ruins of the old farmhouse. There's a very horrible and creepy story about this place that I've expanded upon for a plot for a short story (possibly a novella or novel). It's one of the most disturbing stories I've heard, and I figured out how to make it even more frightening.

This must have been an impressive structure in its day. Built of the local stone.

I'm always on the lookout for big trees and I found this relatively large poplar along the Rockhouse Trail. It's no monster tree, but the biggest one I saw all day.