Sherry Chandler

The Last Day of Summer

__________
Yesterday was International Rock Flipping Day. Due to one thing and another, I forgot. But others kept up the tradition and you can find links to their efforts at Wanderin’ Weeta’s place.

International Rock Flipping Day

I don’t mean to be flip about International Rock Flipping Day, but aside from a sow bug and a couple of crickets that were faster than my finger on the button at getting into their hidey-holes, here is what we found under the rocks. Unfortunately, hubby set this Ale-8 bottle up before I could get a good in situ photo but the thing was buried deep. You can see the hole it was in to the left of the bottle:

Perhaps that shouldn’t be much of a surprise after several weeks of drought. And besides, probably the most exotic thing we could hope to find would be a garter snake, and again, it would probably be faster than I am.

We don’t have a creek on our place, except for the wet-weather stream I’ve pictured here earlier and it doesn’t have a rocky bed. So we decided that the best place to find rocks would be the rock pile. You see it here along with the big sycamore log that is rotting along its edge:

When I was a girl, every farm here in Kentucky had a rock pile like this. Because the topsoil is so thin over a layer of limestone, such limestone rock are constantly turned up by the plow, along with a fair number of arrow and spear points. The farmer would carry the rocks out of the field and fling them onto a rock pile like this. Ours hasn’t been touched in the 25 years I’ve lived here.

So we picked a rock sort of out on the edge of the pile to flip:

And this is what we found (the rock is at my husband’s toe):

For those of you who aren’t locals, Ale-8-One is a Kentucky soft drink, made in Winchester, maybe somewhat comparable to Mountain Dew. It’s so local that when I grew up in Owen County, 60 miles or so to the north of where I live now, I’d never heard of it. I’m told it has a great load of caffeine and during the time when I worked at the convenience store down the road, truckers used to stop in the mornings and buy an Ale-8 and a Moon Pie for breakfast. Truth, I swear.

The mystery to me is how the bottle came to be under the rock. The rock pile is near the road and there are plenty of bottles lying around. If you remember, Billy Carter once described the difference between a good old boy and a redneck: the redneck throws his empty bottle out the window of his pickup truck. The good old boy tosses it in the floorboard.

I saw a guy the other day throw his bottle out the window and into the bed of the truck.

But hard throw your bottle out the window and under a rock.

There’s a moral in here somewhere.

The bottle is green anyway.

The only really interesting thing we found while we were out and about was not under a rock but on our rosemary plant. See this tiny garden spider:

My camera is not that good at close-ups and this guy isn’t as big as a pencil eraser. Here’s another shot.

More on IRFD here at Via Negativa. The IRFD Flickr Pool is here. I’ll be posting more links here as the day goes on.

Other Rock Flippers:

Pohanginapete (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Blaugustine (London, England)
Nature Remains (Ohio, USA)
Pensacola Daily Photo (Florida, USA)
KatDoc�s World (Ohio, USA)
Notes from the Cloud Messenger (Ontario, Canada)
Brittle Road (Texas [?])
osage + orange (Illinois, USA)
Rock Paper Lizard (British Columbia, Canada)
The Crafty H (Virginia, USA)
Chicken Spaghetti (Connecticut, USA)
A Passion for Nature (New York, USA)
The Dog Geek (Virginia, USA)
Blue Ridge blog (North Carolina, USA)
Bug Girl’s Blog (Michigan, USA)
chatoyance (Austin, Texas)
Riverside Rambles (Missouri, USA)
Pines Above Snow(Maryland, USA)
Beth’s stories (Maine, USA)
A Honey of an Anklet (Virginia, USA)
Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia, Canada)
Fate, Felicity, or Fluke (Oregon, USA)
The Northwest Nature Nut (Oregon, USA)
Roundrock Journal (Missouri, USA)
The New Dharma Bums (California, USA)
The Marvelous in Nature (Ontario, Canada)
Via Negativa (Pennsylvania, USA)
Mrs. Gray’s class, Beatty-Warren Middle School (Pennsylvania, USA)
Cicero Sings (British Columbia, Canada)
Pocahontas County Fair (West Virginia, USA)
Let’s Paint Nature (Illinois, USA)

* * *

Photos

IRFD group on Flickr
IRFD
gallery on Via Negativa