Throwing Thursday Back To Burlington June 1997 With The Jones Boys

Or was it June 1998?

I do not remember for sure, but my limited mathematic calculating skills tilt the year to being 1997, due to the nature of the occasion of the picture, and who is in the picture, and the year that particular person was born.

The particular person in question was born in 1979, in June of that year. That particular person would in the following decade become the proud papa of Spencer Jack, which renders that particular person my nephew Jason.

Who would have thought when this picture was taken that a decade later I would be returning from Texas to find myself chasing a toddler named Spencer Jack around Bay View State Park?

Those are the Jones boys lined up in the backyard of 1027 Washington Avenue in Burlington, Washington, the backyard of the house I grew up in.

We were in that backyard near the end of the event which saw Jason graduate high school, which took place outdoors, at the B-EHS football field. Jason's family sat in what was/is known as the visitor's grandstand on the north side of the field. I remember this as being one odd graduation, what with it being outdoors, and yet still noisy.

Though my memory of this day does not recollect it, due to the photographic evidence you see below, mom and dad were among us graduation attendees.

At that point in time mom and dad lived half the year in Arizona, in Yuma, and in Washington when it got too hot in Arizona. In Washington mom and dad's summer residence was at Lake Cushman, in a deluxe cabin on a golf course, which their eldest daughter, Clancy, built for them.

By the mid 1990s Jason's dad, my little brother Jake, bought the house we grew up in and lived there, with Jason and his little brother, Joey. That all soon was to change for a variety of reasons.

I forgot to mention, that line up of Jones boys at the top is the aforementioned Jake on the left, with Jason next to Jake, with me next to Jason, with Joey next to me on the right.

I did not see Joey this past summer when I was up in Washington. When we were in Lynden, saying goodbye to dad, Joey was up in Canada catching salmon. Joey's grandpa would have approved of Joey fishing rather than being in Lynden, what with Joey being the one who has embraced the family fishing gene he inherited from his grandpa.

I last saw Joey in October of 2015, at a McDonald's in Grapevine, Texas. In 1997 had you told me that in 2015 I would be seeing Joey at a McDonald's in a town in Texas my feeble imagination would not have been able to conjure a scenario where that made any sense. And yet such is what came to pass.

And still really makes no sense...