A Running Collection

Today. I loaded up my kiddos and headed towards the seed store to buy potato starts for the garden. We love visiting Gramlings in Tallahassee. Gramlings is a garden store housed in an old warehouse. The roof is rusty. The floors are old strong wood and the doors are always wide open. We head that way a few times a year to reload on seeds. The guys there are so nice and helpful. They weigh out our seeds, scoop them into brown paper bags, label and tape shut. The cash register is old but they have a visa machine just in case.  We drove at a stop and go pace through town. As we got closer to the capital, we could see there was a lot of activity. Even a helicopter in the air. The first thing we saw were piles of police. Straight faced, lined up in rows. We were at a red light for a minute and I saw a minute too much.  White angry people holding signs screaming and spitting in a rage — ranting that this was their land - that they built it. Their signs said “Florida Soverei...

It is NOT a hop skip and a jump to Colorado Springs from Arches National Park. And there isn’t much in the in between. We tried to stop for dinner at a lovely park on the Snake River, but the mosquitos showed no mercy and the heat beat down. The best move was to move, so we did. Eventually, exhaustion won and we started looking for places to camp hours short of the Springs. If you want to camp at a camp ground in Colorado in July, book it now, because every single one will be full when the warm weather arrives.  I phoned a long time friend from my childhood that now lives in Gypsum and asked her for some advice. She led us to a camp ground with one site available. We grabbed it immediately, set up camp, and the sun beat down and the mosquitos were right behind it. We decided to find a place to eat dinner. Our cooler was empty as was our morale. We looked like people that had been on the road for nearly 48 hours, but that didn’t stop us from waltzing into the restaurant and...

Washington felt totally unreal and real. It felt like I could wake up at the Kingston house and just step into life as it was 16 years ago but now we had FOUR children and nearly a lifetime to separate us from this place.  Where to start? We just jumped in. We called Scott and Heather McMinds’ as if we were still living life side by side. When we were just fresh married and not sure what to do with ourselves, we house sat for snowbirds and worked and went to school, so we weren't really setting up house, which meant sometimes we were twiddling our thumbs . "What do you want to do?” we would say to each other. We'd call Scott and Heather and either ride our clunky motorcycle or Vanagan over to their place. They were 13 miles away. Out in the country. But, it is still the most beautiful drive ever. It drops from the hills to the water front of Seabeck Washington. The water meets the mountains there. Green mountains and fog and clouds and a fishing town and bald ...