The rain we had is basically gone.

A few days ago some scientist fellow pronounced the drought over. It won’t be over for very long if this continues like it has. I know we got some rainfall, more than we have had in many months, but it hasn’t continued. No rain and as hot as it has gotten already, we are going to be dry again and again in a drought if we don’t have at least a decent rain a week during the summer.

If you will ride down to the park here in town, you will see just how much the river is down over what it was back in May. It looks like a big monster is sucking in all the water from the lake. No monster, it is the fact that there is little or no water coming down the river systems to refill the lake and swell the rivers back to full.

Last Tuesday, I went to the dam and there were no gates up. That means that we were not sending any water down the river to the coast, so it is going to get low and dry there also. The folks in Blountstown are going to be asking for a little help before long and without any water coming down from our north, there will not be much we can do.

The Fourth of July holiday weekend is just a few days off and the fish are biting. This holiday includes many things and among them is water sports and water activities. I know when I was growing up there were not many Fourths that we didn’t have a fish fry, though we usually didn’t wait until the morning of the Fourth to try and catch the fish. We usually went fishing on that morning and added to the fish to be cooked what we have taken that morning. That is what is called fresh fish. They were caught, cooked and eaten in one half-day period. Labor day was an excuse to do it again and we usually did.

If you plan on going to the coast over the holidays , you can catch fish out on the big water. Practically everyone that has gone during the last two or three weeks has come back with their limit of fish.

Kings have been running great.

Snapper, though not a large as kings, have been showing off.

A lot of other saltwater fish have been doing their share of showing off as well. If you like saltwater fishing, from now until after the Fourth of July may be an excellent time for you to start saltwater fish catching. Fishing is having fun while catching is what fills the stomach, and if work is not too pressing, will send you back for another sunburn and also some excellent fish to make another meal with.

I talk about meats to eat most of the time unless I am talking about fish, but I like vegetables also and had some good fresh squash last week.

Here several years ago I went by Cross Hardware in Iron City one Tuesday afternoon. While there they asked if I liked squash. I allowed as how I did and they gave me most of a grocery bag filled with young tender squash, just the way I would have picked them myself. They are raw, but I can almost smell and taste them on the way back home. Now I am leaving the next morning for the rest of the week, so I am thinking then and everyday for the rest of the week just how good they will taste when I arrive back in Bainbridge on Friday night.

We sit down to eat that night and it is good, but there are no squash on the table. So I asked if she had planned to have them on Saturday night. The terrible answer I got was she had eaten all the squash while I was gone, not part of them, but all. I really didn’t want to eat the rest of my dinner and then told her it would be a cold day before I brought anymore home.

We had a cool day or two, well night, here about two weeks or so ago.

Mr. Herman Coker from Newton gave me a good mess of some very young squash. I could vividly remember the last time this happened so thought about what to do all the way home. When I got to Bainbridge I went by my son and daughter-in-law’s house and asked Sarah if she knew how to cook squash on top of the stove. Stewed and cooked down with a little onion in it.

I almost died when she said she had never cooked any like that. But them she said it couldn’t be that difficult. They both can cook. When you eat at their house it is like eating something your personal chef has prepared. A couple of days later she cooked them like she had done it all her life and they were as good as the ones my wife finished off several years earlier.

The rest of the meal wasn’t bad either and the both of us ate so much we had difficulty sleeping that night.