Tag Archives: driving

Road trip

The world’s largest skateboard.  To be found, naturally, at the skateboard camp, Woodward, where we dropped Dan recently (that’s him in the foreground).

Pennsylvania was HOT and dry, although I understand that they received some rain since our trip.  You can see how hazy it was.

Blogging has changed me since the last trip down.  On my mind frequently during the drive — seeing the beautiful barns, some in fine repair and others not — was Virginia Gertenbach’s work — both her blog and her quilts — and notably a recent article in “Quilting Arts”.

I like to take pictures as we are driving.  Part of me still revels in the non-filmness of digital photography — all those blurs of nothing can be deleted at no cost to me! I also like ‘drive by shooting’  because it frames reality very differently from how I, as picture-taker, do.  I  like to view the randomness of the camera’s eye.  Sometimes, I get something really interesting that I would never in a million years have framed  ‘on my own’.

The picture below was taken while driving — not exactly speeding along, for obvious reasons — but not stopping to carefully frame a picture either.  One of the buggies was filled with a sweet grouping of children under the age of ten and I would have love to have captured an image of them, but that is one of the foibles of drive-by photography.  The reason I like THIS picture, though, is it lets the viewer feel the oddity of cars and buggies occupying the same road.

How does your garden grow?

How lovely to fight solar glare at drop-off today!  It’s a real circus, drop-off is.  Students coming and going, lugging backpacks, strutting their uggs (girls), nearly losing their pants (boys), drivers pausing, then not pausing, inserting themselves, waiting, then not waiting, the U driveway, the crosswalks, the parking lots, left and right — it’s a big ole mess, and not the least bit so because many behind the wheel are brand new drivers (and teenagers, to boot).  So, when you add blinding sun, it is always a cause for caution and concern.

But, today I said, “Yippee”, because who can’t use a little sun at this point?!

Raking recently, I made an interesting find.  Not a soccer ball or hockey puck — though I find plenty of those.  In fact, I have long maintained that the thing I grow best are balls (GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER).  I refer, here, not to my male progeny, or my own lizard brain’s tendency toward aggression, but to the propensity for all manner of recreational balls to land in my perennial beds.  Baseballs and whiffle balls from my baseball-crazy neighbor, soccer balls from my boys and two kitty-corner neighbors, kick balls that crossed two fences from the schoolyard behind us, tennis balls from god-knows-where, and lacrosse balls, which can be blue, yellow, or white.


And, as trees have ‘drip zones’, I have long been aware that D.’s second-story window has a ‘launch zone’, in which I am STILL uncovering various objects like Playmobil pirates, Legos, and things so wrapped in duct tape I have no idea what they are.


But, imagine my surprise when I unearthed C.’s missing RETAINER in the beds by the driveway!!!  It has since been replaced (at a cost I won’t reveal because I don’t want to lose my breakfast), but nevertheless, it truly felt like the boys’-toy-garden-turned-treasure-trove and surely will go down in family lore, along with the story of K.’s father going through reams of garbage to find HIS lost retainer some 40 years ago.