Our only Grand Daughter Lily Danielle Gonzales enjoys playing in our yard, throwing small sticks, being a Great Fireman with one of the water sprinklers which she sprays down her Brother Xander and her Paw Paw with much enthusiasm.  Lily also likes to "play" grocery shopping with her Maw Maw's red rollator and Lily calls it her shopping cart.  Of course her Paw Paw has to give her frequent rides through our home with the rollator too.  We make a long loop through the front living room, hallway, my bride's TV/rec room, kitchen squeezing between the island/work station/bar stools and wall ending back into the front living room.

She loves to go into the woods on our property which she refers to as "The Jungle" with the terminology derived from some of the kid movies she watches.  Her Brother Xander and all three of us go on some short hikes, of which a small tributary branch aka stream meanders across our property and flows into Culpepper Creek which crosses Anson High School Road empting into Gould's Fork, Brown Creek and then terminates into the Pee Dee River above the 109 Hwy. North river bridge.

I trapped many raccoons and a couple otter back in the early 1980s about 100 yards from our property on said Culpepper Creek when fur prices were very high!

Getting just a little side tracked which is my normal MO modus operandi, the past couple trips to the jungle, Lily has gathered fallen hickory nuts and throws them into a small hole of water.  She will throw one into the water and it will make a plop sound with the water jumping up and as she will say, "It jumps up and it jumps down."  I get a good grin going watching her throw the green and black dried hickory nuts with her left and right hand, although she is predominately a south paw.  She is definitely ambidextrous for sure.

AMPHIBIOUS

After the last sentence above, I can't help but grin at the statement Charles Shackleford made on TV when a sports caster commented on his ability to shoot with either hand and I copy and paste from Wikipedia,  Shackleford is sometimes remembered for telling a reporter after a NC State basketball game that "I can shoot with my left hand, I can shoot with my right hand, I'm amphibious."

His scholarship was definitely not academic for sure....grin if you must, I know I am!

LILY IN ACTION

Miss Lily looks little in this pix compared to the high bank drop off at the water hole!

Lily has good follow through!

On this last jungle outing, Lily picked up a good amount of the fallen hickory nuts.  Squirrels will cut into the green hickory nuts and somehow extract the nut portion from the shell.  I have cracked open dried hickory nuts as a small boy and later on, however the amount of nut extracted from those thick shelled hickory nuts to me personally is not worth the effort.  On a positive note, the hickory nut has an excellent taste when the nut is properly dried out, but again, a lot of work for such a small return.

ARCHIVED PIX OF THE ABOVE WATER HOLE

The above water hole about dried up on 08-24-16 and a week later was bone dry.  There is a large rock shelf diagonally across the water hole protruding about a foot and started to pan for gold but didn't get around to it.  Anson County in the early to middle 1800s was a hot spot for gold production, mostly placer gold and later went to the hard rock mining technique when the placer gold deposits were no longer productive.  When the California gold rush started after gold was found at Sutter's Mill in 1848, prospectors headed west seeking fortune and fame and were labeled the 49rs.  

Xander and myself have shot many 3/8 inch diameter steel balls into the water hole before it dried up and when I later dug the remaining sediment, sand, etc. from the hole looking for gold flakes/nuggets, there was not a single steel ball bearing located which lets you know the force of running water, especially when we have a gully wash aka frog strangler type of rain.

One of these days, the Lord willing of course, I will search out Culpepper Creek and find where those steel ball bearings ended up and that is where you will find some gold nuggets no doubt.

BACK TO LILY

Our family has enjoyed Lily relating to us about throwing those hickory nuts into the water; "It goes plop, the water jumps up and the water jumps down."  Lily will have her arm extended up as high as she can get it when she says, "The water jumps up."  Lisa tried to correct Lily on the water falling down, but she gave her Mom a Lily look and said, "It jumps down."......another grin is in order.

I gave Lily and Xander an aluminum telescopic walking stick and Lily likes to make holes in the dirt with the carbide tip. 

In closing, kids and grand kids makes life really worth while and are a blessing from God!

Web page created by Bill aka Mickey Porter on 07-15-2020.