The Stone Arch Bridge

The gray sky rumbled, as my feet squished through the muddy trail and seeped over my ankles to color my socks black-speckled brown. Joan turned aside, as the wind flapped her windbreaker, while trying to avoid the stinging pellets of the March rain. We were heading to the stone arch, a quarter mile away to get out of the bitter-cold rain.

“A great day for photography!” she shouted through the wind.

“Yeah! I wish I’d brought my umbrella to keep my camera dry!” I replied.

“I don’t know if I could use my camera. My fingers are so cold.”

”Well, let’s see what we can take pictures of while standing under the arch!”

We began to quicken our paces. My toes were already numb from cold. I needed to do something to stay warm. Joan reached the arch, seconds behind me and we laughed. We looked like a couple of wet rags hanging out to dry on a rainy day!

As our eyes began to adjust to the shadowy areas under the arch, we each began to gasp and exclaim!

“Hey! Look at this moss growing on this colorful rock!”

“Look how the colors stand out when the rocks are wet!”

“Here’s a place where the water is trickling down.”

“Hey! I found it! It landed in my eye!”

We smiled. We hadn’t seen each other for over a year-and-a-half. It was so wonderful to spend part of the day together again, like we used to do back in high school.

We were two peas in a pod, then, and we were still now. We smiled on that rainy day in March, knowing we had treasures to share, under the stone arch bridge.

Precious Linda, c. 2013

This was written during our Practice Writing Group with the prompt of: stone arch, for 11 minutes.