Back from a long weekend in Katy with the Reaves clan. Mom’s hanging in there, which I think may surprise her a little. With Mitchel back from her year in Paris, we got everybody in one place for the first time in a while.

According to Wikipedia, Katy really got on the map when the M-K-T Railroad (on whose old right of way we used to go running and biking when we lived in “M"issouri) came through in the 1890s. The railway allowed large scale agriculture to take off in this otherwise swampy area: first sugar cane, then rice. Katy built the first concrete rice dryers in Texas. Today, it’s a thriving suburb where they can’t build new condos fast enough. The railroad is reduced to an inspiration for yard art and a small museum in an old caboose, and the empty dryers loom sadly over the freeway as people throng to the mall.