Church in the Park

In the early 1990s, when we lived in Wyoming, church happened at a local park during the summer. Mom and Dad rented a pavilion for a few hours each week (I think it looked similar to the pavilion on the right side of this post?)

Sometimes the grownups would grill hotdogs or hamburgers, at other times Mom would bring a pre-cooked, covered dish from home to share. Many of our church members were young college students who didn't cook so their contributions to our church dinner were often  the kind of junk food that Mom normally didn't feed us - store-bought cookies, chips, maybe even a litre or two of off-brand soda.

We'd have a short church service, eat whatever food had been brought to share and then Jesse and I would run off to play in the park. (Aaron was still a toddler when we first moved to Wyoming. I don't remember him joining our unsupervised play until he was a bit older.)

I've never been back to that park (or even the state of Wyoming!) as an adult although I suspect that the former was probably neither as large nor as isolated as I remember. I know it had at least one parking lot that was close enough to the playground that, on other days, Mom and Dad could sit in the car and talk while the three of us played knowing that we'd hear the car horn when it beeped to tell us that it was time to go home.

For some reason, early June reminds me of this park.  Maybe we attended some sort of special event there at about that time of year that I've long since forgotten?

(Photo credit.)