Just about every year of my adult life, I took at least a week…and often two or three…and brought my girls to West Virginia to see their Mountaineer family. Most often, we came in July. You could pretty much bet the monsoons of June were past and it wasn’t so dreadfully hot and humid like August. Since my girls are almost sixteen years apart, there were just a few years I had both of them with me.

I have great memories of those trips. When my older daughter was little, she stood on a stool and brushed her great grandma’s long hair. I have a picture of her holding a bamboo fishing rod with a safety pin for a fish hook, wearing a Holly Hobby hat and a one piece play suit. When my younger daughter was little, we took “moon baths” out behind grandma’s house. We waited till dark then stripped off and lathered up, then poured cold buckets of rainwater over ourselves to rinse off. It was the only way to cool off enough to sleep.

Now it’s ME that lives in West Virginia and Little is coming in July in two weeks to see us! We’ll be baking and swimming, crafting and sewing, and I’ll indulge in a new experience…cosplay! If you don’t know what that is, it’s where you dress up like your favorite characters, makeup and all, and film yourself or take photos. Little is really into it and I’m into Little so we’re going to give it a go! It should be fun!

We had some pretty hard storms come through yesterday. When I saw the sky darkening and heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, I shot out of the house to close up the camper. I left the windows open the evening before and I didn’t want everything to get wet. I prepared to lower the top of the camper and….the actuator (the mechanical part that lifts and lowers the top) didn’t work. I tried checking the circuit breakers and the fuses, but that storm was rolling in fast at that point. The sky started crackling with lightning and thunder so I closed it all back up and ran for the house.

So, now I have yet another thing wrong with the camper. I spoke with the service guy and he sent another email to the factory with photos and the additional info about the actuator. We have camping reservations when we go to Virginia to pick Little up so they are going to ship a new actuator to us and Mr. FixIt can replace it. That way we can still use the camper that weekend, then I can get it up to the dealership. They will have to ship it to the factory, I imagine. Still waiting to hear. We don’t have camping scheduled again till September so hopefully they will get the camper in and out and back to us in a timely fashion.

After supper, Mr. FixIt went out to see if the storm knocked any limbs down. Pretty soon he came and tapped on the window in the family room and motioned for me to come outside. I followed him out into the shadow of the nearest pear tree and looked in the direction he was pointing. There, on the ground beside the camper, lay the twins…the tiny spotties…the fawns that joined our little tribe this spring. Later in the evening, Mommy joined them. There’s a big, fat groundhog in the front yard this summer. I don’t like them hanging around, even though I don’t have a garden this year. But they dig up the yard and embankment with tunnels that can pose a safety hazard and damage structures. 

I continue to watch this sweater that I’m knitting for Big grow longer and more beautiful. I’ll have quite a lot of finishing work to do on it, but I’m thinking she’ll really enjoy it when I’m done. We’ll be having a lot of rain this weekend so I’ll get a chance to work on my knitting and getting a little housecleaning done in preparation for Little’s arrival.

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“Grandchildren are the crown of the aged, and the glory of children is their fathers.”

Proverbs 17:6 ESV