A Family Outing

Strictly speaking, I don’t have a photo album. I don’t keep photos on Facebook, uploading them as I take them. That bugs me, because to me the viewers and ‘friends’ are getting the second-hand experience and cryptic in-jokes. Memories they don’t actually have.

As for a real one, I bought an album but only made a small effort to put photos in it. I still have photos loose – I blame this on the fact that my photos are the size of a credit card, and I’ve yet to find an album with pockets that suit this description.

So instead I’ll pick a photo off the bookcase.

A photo of myself… This is a rarity. However, in my rarely-used album there are two, side by side. One is of my dad and I, the other is of my mum and I. We stand in front of a waterfall, one that’s a fraction of what it could be. Dad tells me that in winter, when it rains, the fall of water is greater, heavier. My captions – early January – tell me it’s summer, and from the short-sleeved T-shirts, it’s a warm summer. It’s taken after a long and winding road to get there; narrow lanes and sharp curves, the kind where vehicles approach seemingly out of nowhere and you sit quietly lest you startle the driver.

During the time in front of the falls there were kids hopping into the lake below the falls, and I remember being oddly enchanted with a group of ducks swimming. Hey, I’m a city girl, we just don’t get a lot of ducks in town. There was a bridge, solid and yet you could feel when other people passed, footfalls significantly heavy that you noticed. This bridge led to various hiking trails and I pled the case for the longer ones, losing in favour of lunch.

We walked a short distance, looking at the falls from different angles and pondering the different wildlife. After, we returned to the car and unloaded a picnic. 

Mum doled out her homemade bacon-and-egg pie, and Dad sliced up bread. I fixed up cutlery and napkins, made up hot drinks from a Thermos and scorned the fresh tomatoes on offer. We ate with a great view of the waterfall and various birds hopping around our feet hoping for crumbs. 

Eventually we got back in the car and retraced the long and winding route back home, to the hustle of the city.