Somtimes, I Surreptitiously Look For A Hidden Camera

You never know which new thread is going to be woven into Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's rich tapestry on any given day.

On this beautiful 74-degree jewel, on the way home from The Devil's Playground, all by my lonesome, without even my little Pony to pack in the week's groceries, I found a new thread at the low-water bridge.

Somebody has broken off one of the four main bright orange markers that denote the edge of the concrete at each end. You know, to prevent novices from driving right off the un-railed sides and into the drink. To break off these orange three-foot-high flexible warning stalks, one would have to deliberately tussle with that plastic until enough stress was applied to snap it off at the base. There is no way a car could run over it and break it, because then that car would have its tire off the edge of the bridge. That's kind of noticeable.

The breakage of the orange warning stick is not the new thread. The new thread is what I saw on the little triangle of concrete where that orange warning stick used to be. The triangle of concrete where the bridge flows over onto the ground, before giving way to plain old mud. The little flare at the end of the bridge, where bridge meets land.

It was a woman in a bikini laying on a blanket with a toddler in a bikini sitting beside her.

Seriously. How dense do you have to be to lay on a slab of bridge concrete with your head two feet from the rolling tires of T-Hoes, dump trucks, septic-tank suckers, trailers loaded with backhoes, and mailmen driving from the wrong side of the front seat? AND to expose your toddler to such danger.

I fear that when I kick my proposed handbasket factory into high-gear production, I will find such a sunbather draped over the assembly line, next to the giant buzz saw like the one in a Dudley Do Right cartoon.

I might as well warn that gal, if I see her on the bridge again, that my proposed handbasket factory is off limits to sunbathers. I don't mean to be a Snidely Whiplash, but I think it's the least I can do. Then she can get an early start moving on to her next sunbathing spot: the railroad tracks.