Day 199, Tuesday, December 20

I rode over to Brookley this morning. When we lived here, Mom used to take us to Brookley to play on a section of beach adjoining the air field. As a child, I remember this beach being a wonder of life. We used to take our dip nets there and dip in the bay, and in a creek that empties across the beach into the bay, for sail fin mollies (a brilliantly colored minows with large, rainbow-colored, sail-like fins), fiddler crabs, and all manner of other brackish water life that magically decided to jump into our nets. Back then the beach, to my child hood mind, was beautiful and relatively clean. Now, after the storm, it’s dirty, covered with debris and broken glass and foul smelling. It’s no longer any place that’d be safe for kids to play. Near the beach there was a community center where we went to swim and sometimes have birthday parties under the sycamore trees. The center is still there but the swimming pool is completely filled in with dirt and grassed over.
Just down the road from our house at 14 North Reed Ave., was a small park, Fearnway Park, where we used to go once we got old enough to venture off of our own block. I remembered there being an old dry fountain we used to play in riding our bikes around like a race track. After leaving Brookley I went to see if the park was still there. Not only was it still there, it was in exactly the same condition as I remembered it from my childhood, including the dry fountain. Also in Fearnway was a drainage ditch we used to play around. Drainage ditch sounds so much less magical than it seemed back as children. It’s got moss-covered concrete walls just far enough apart to make it a bit of a challenge for 9-year old to jump across and in general it’s done as a nice looking centerpiece for the park. “Ditch” definitely doesn’t do it justice.
Leaving Fearnway, I headed over by Government Street Presbyterian Church which we attended the entire time we lived in Mobile. I didn’t go inside but took some pictures of the outside of the building. After that I went over to Baytreat, the beach front house in Fairhope, AL which Gov’t Street Presb. Church owns and uses as a church retreat setting. The dock was mostly blown away but other than that, the place was exactly as I remembered is from my childhood.