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Playground on a dripping day
It’s been a hot summer here in Texas, so to make myself feel cooler, I’m posting this picture that I made on a cold, damp day last December. I found this antiquated playground in a tiny town way up in the top of the Texas Pandhandle.
Mobeetie, Texas
photographed 12.27.2019
Winter pool
Here’s the town swimming pool, a couple of days after Christmas. Evidently the lifeguards get different jobs in the winter months.
Canadian, Texas
photographed 12.27.2019
Snow Morning
A little bit of overnight snow made Saturday morning look a lot different than the morning before. But by the middle of the day, the snow was gone.
Which reminds me, when we were in Minnesota last fall the main topic of conversation among the locals was Winter. (They capitalized it when they spoke the word. I could tell.) One man told us that a few winters ago there was “too much snow” to use a snowmobile. There’s almost nothing in that sentence that makes any kind of sense to me.
Sadly, this lovely bit of snow turned tragic: about the same time I was making this image, a driver lost control of her vehicle and ran into a group of first responders who were on the scene of earlier accidents. Two of the first responders were killed and the other one is still hospitalized. The first funeral is today; our whole city is in shock over what happened. That doesn’t have anything to do with this photo, but it’s been on my mind this week.
Lubbock County, Texas
photographed 1.11.2020
The Bleak Playground
I think my dad’s family moved to Mobeetie in the early 1930s; the bank my grandfather had in Branson, Colorado, didn’t survive the Depression so they came to Texas to make a new start. My dad lived there until he and eleven other students made up the graduating class of 1940. He was 16 when he graduated, and he headed off to what was then known as Texas Technological College. (He went from a town of 400 people to a college with an enrollment of just under 3,800. No wonder he flunked out.*)
I don’t really think this playground equipment was there when he was, but I did get a bit of a weird vibe from it. Of course, that might also have been from the cold wind that day…
Old Mobeetie, Texas
photographed 12.27.2019
*Not to worry, though. He retuned to college and made straight As in his chosen field of civil engineering. The most frequently told story of my whole life was How I Was Too Young When I Went To College.
Alley View
The winter-day alley view. (Look closely at the building on the right and you can see a row of tiny icicles…)
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 3.3.2019
