Ready or not!

Summer has come to end, but with a bang in our home.

We made our trip to the deep south. The home of my youth. The stomping grounds of my teen years. And the location of my match made in heaven wedding.

We took the children to the stretch of beach my parents lived on until day of my birth and splashed in every summer, as much as I could. We toured downtown and the Battery, site of the historic first shot of the Civil War. Okay...that was actually at Fort Sumter, but right there in the harbor. We bought t-shirts like tourist...

And that is when I realized that this is exactly what my children are there. Tourist. So strange and bizarre to me. Even their father has lived there before.They have never experienced 8 months of summer or the wet, rainy winter. Nor have they inhaled the thick musk of jasmine, honeysuckle, wisteria, and azaleas mixing in the summer evening air.

The last day we were there we went to Old Fort Dorchester, the site of my 1998 wedding. It was a Puritan church steeple in the late 1600's. My sister took pictures of us there with our brood of 5...and we kissed in the same spot that we had shared our first kiss as husband and wife...12 years before.



While in South Carolina, we learned that my father was having health complications, so we left early and heading to our married home of Kentucky. It was a nerve racking drive and weekend, but all is well now and he is home.

Back here in Ohio, our new home. The place my children with call their stomping grounds,the boys have cranked back up with baseball. The girls are trying out gymnastics. School is back in session in our little downstairs schoolroom. Groceries are being bought. Rooms being purged and cleaned. Garage sales planned.

It is the beginning of a new season, walking further down the path we started twelve years ago. It is always new. It is always fresh. It never lacks surprises.

And into to this new season we go...ready or not!