Train-ing

A scimitar moon hangs in the blue-black sky as I drive home. A train passes silently along the tracks, silently because I’m cocooned in the van. Lights shine from inside the cars, warming the night, and although it’s merely a commuter train, it plucks memories from my heart, memories of trips to visit my grandparents in California.

In a reflective mood

My part of the Civil War

My great-great grandfather was born in Bavaria, Germany in March 1841. His family moved to the United States in 1851 and in 1863, he joined Company F-8 Regiment Indiana Volunteer Cavalry. He was with Sherman on the
“March through the South”, before moving to a farm in Nebraska in 1883. This is a copy of the original photo owned by a relative. I loved it as a child and he made a copy for me.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

This is where I change each year from someone with a daily routine and responsibilities
to a relaxed and renewed person who has time to think.

How it all began

I may have inherited my love of horses from my dad because I don’t remember a time when I haven’t loved horses. I knew where all the horse books in our library were and I read them all. I think I learned to ride through reading those books, because I didn’t take any lessons, but I seemed to know how to ride instinctively.

I wanted nothing more than a horse. I wanted one enough to put up with, and enjoy, the occasional rides to no- much-of -on bored horses at a nearby stable, rides where the horse couldn’t be forced into a trot without massive amounts of kicking. I didn’t get a horse until much later but one day someone came by our house with a pony and my parents paid for my brother and me to have our pictures taken on it.  That is definitely a look of pure happiness!

Trekking on the tracks

There’s something magical about train rides, something that transports me back to the days of my childhood, when we used to take the San Francisco Zephyr from Omaha to California to visit my grandparents. The train station, a vast, cavernous structure, filled with echoes of the life surging inside. I don’t remember, but I imagine it was also beautiful in a way that so few buildings are these days, due to a lethal combination of cost, lack of care in building, and indifference to architectural beauty or, possibly, different ideas of what constitutes that beauty.

Family, food and fun in Philly

A husband who’s faithful 100%

Some of you know my husband and I have been living mostly in two different places for more than four years.  We’re getting closer and closer to the time when we’ll finally be able to be in the same place. So it’s time to give a big shout-out to my husband who, like Dr. Seuss’ Horton, remained faithful 100% to me over those long years apart, an elephantine feat that in this day and age is something worth celebrating!

Birthday surprise

Our older daughter sent me some beautiful flowers for my birthday…but sent them to the house where I wasn’t!  Fortunately, my lovely neighbor,who also gets my mail from the box each day, took the flowers in, too. 

(The gifts I received from everyone else were just as much appreciated but not as beautiful to photograph!)

Thankful Thursday and the errant email

Every Thursday, an online group of which I’m a part, has Thankful Thursday, something instituted by yours truly in an attempt to bring some balance to the litany of shared woes.  Don’t get me wrong.  Sharing these woes and asking for prayer is part of what this group does and we are privileged to do so, but it’s far too easy to get into a woe-is-me frame of mind and never think of the many blessings in our lives.