"Adventures" in a once rural GA,is rapidly becoming suburbanized.

Grown son in his backyard—a Georgia one, full of oaks and pines and a lot of leaves, needles and dirt—with his daughters, two and four. They are playing on the swing set; Mommy is at work at "Tar-jay." Suddenly, they hear a noise, a loud buzzing and whirring. Sam looks around and there are a zillion termites taking April flight from a stump in the yard. Instinctively, he looks at the foundation of his house. The little family is hard up this month, not a cent left for a termite treatment, although living in a log cabin in GA, this is a perennial threat.

The girls are a little frightened, but Sam explains these are just bugs. His own fear, about their house and the termites, he keeps to himself. meanwhile, a great cloud of insects balls up and then snakes away, leaving the kids open-mouthed with wonder.

Another strange sound begins, snorting and stamping. Sam looks around, and lo and behold, now there is a beef steer glaring at him from not too far away. (Somewhere, in the nearby feedlot, a fence must be down.) He picks up his girls, one under each arm, while the steer continues to stare. Then he snorts, stamps and breaks into a run—straight toward them.

A moment of suburban unreality, as Daddy processes. Then, remembering some piece of rural lore, he waits, stepping aside only at the last instant, yelling kids hugged close. The steer, with his grubby red sides and rich smell, gallops past and away, on and on through the row of backyards, angling easily around sandboxes and swing sets as he goes. Hooves hammer the ground and throw up big clods of Georgia clay.

Sam called to share the story. He was still laughing. “I had to tell someone.” When I agreed that this was a tale that shouldn’t have to keep, he added, “The girls and I are inside now, making stuff with Play Dough. They said they've had enough swinging today.”