Summer Days Make Me Feel Fine

Do ever have one of those days where you just want to hang out on your back porch, sitting on a towel next to your box fan and a giant watermelon?

Uh, you don't?

Yeah, me neither.

There are a lot of things about this picture that make me stop and think--a lot of unanswered questions, the first of which being, "Why do fat kids love purple?" I don't have an answer to that one, and believe me I've given it a lot of thought. The thing I can tell you about this picture is that it was taken at some sort of church function at our house. And, because it was a 1980s church function at our house, I can tell you exactly what the rest of the scene is. If you were to pan around the rest of the backyard, you'd see a group of people sitting on metal folding chairs, all placed in a giant circle. My dad had one deeply held conviction about get-togethers:

"A chair for every person, and a person for every chair." Preferably, each person would be seated in his chair.

You see, if you set the chairs up in a circle, then you can see everyone at the party. If it's a large party, it might make conversation a little difficult or produce a lot of shouting over each other, but a least you won't have your back to any of those church people. Which is really the best way to go, because who knows when you might get shanked by someone at your church watermelon party.

Only joking, of course! The only knifing done was to that watermelon, and what a watermelon it was.

The funny thing is, I have no idea the girl on the other side of the watermelon is. She looks sweet though, like the kind of girl who knows how to smile demurely in pictures and point her fork toward the ridiculously over sized watermelon as if to say, "I'm going to take one tiny bite out of this big watermelon."

All that to say that, if I had an exact opposite, that sweet girl would surely be it. There I sit--looking straight at the camera, two forks pointed at a mouth so wide open you can nearly see the back of my throat. This is the only child in her natural state, and what a beautiful state it is.