Summer Thoughts

If you are reading this before 10:30 a.m. Friday look up in the sky and say a little prayer for me. That’s about the time I’ll be jumping out of a plane in Lexington for the Habitat for Humanity Skydiving Fundraiser.

In all there’s 16 of us skydiving throughout the day Friday and four more folks using vouchers to do so at a later date. Say a prayer for all of them too. I know I will.

I’m sure all will go well. Lord willing, I’ll tell you all about the experience in this space next week.

I hated to hear the news that Father Eric Hungerford is leaving La Grange after seven years.

I never heard a sermon from the pastor of La Grange’s St. James Episcopal Church, but through my role here at the newspaper I got to meet him several times and hear him speak at different events, and I have the utmost respect for him and the work he’s done here. His departure is a great loss from La Grange, but best wishes to he and his family in Philadelphia.

Well, summer officially began last Sunday but I don’t have to tell you it’s felt like summer for a few weeks already.

So many people hate the heat around here, but I try to embrace it.

I blame by upbringing.

When I was a kid we didn’t have air-conditioning. My folks didn’t get it until I was in my mid-20s.

So as a kid there was no escaping the heat for me. You opened the windows, turned on the fans and drank a heck of a lot of Kool-Aid.

When I was about 12 or so, my grandmother down the road did break down and get a window unit. My siblings and I were excited at the prospect of being able to walk over and get out of the heat.

We were mistaken.

My grandmother turned it on the first day she got it just to see if it worked and probably didn’t use that thing again for months.

She was a product of the depression and watched her electric bill like a hawk and probably only used her AC once or twice a year – usually when company far more important than us were visiting.

I noticed some of the eggs our chickens were laying out in the back shed were getting crushed. Seemed suspicious to me. So I set one of those live box traps baited with an egg and the first night I caught the cutest little possum. Looked like a young adult to me.

The trap was a old handme-down from my late grandmother. It still has a bunch of old red paint coated all over it. My grandma used to catch possums around her pear and persimmon trees. She throw some red paint on them before taking them down to her creek to release them. If she ever caught one marked with red paint she knew she had to haul it off further.

We didn’t paint our possum red, but he did get hauled off to a next little creek bottom Wednesday morning – far away from any other houses, and our eggs.

My mom turned 80 years old a few days ago, and we held a celebration for her on Sunday, combining it with Fathers’ Day festivities. At the suggestion of one of my sisters, we agreed to hold a talent show in the front yard for my parents to enjoy.

My parents loved it.

Three generations of Wicks (ranging in age from 58 to 3) signed up and did everything from telling jokes to skits to balancing a long piece of pvc pipe on their chin – yeah,you guessed it, that was one of my talents.

But I was not content with only one talent. I did another one where I asked the audience to shout out three words and I would make sure to include them in my next column in the newspaper.

They didn’t do me any favors. They chose three words that have nothing to do with Fayette County. Inserting such random words into a column in this newspaper would be harder than hitting an elephant in Africa with a harpoon.