Summer Things

Well, here’s a dilemma. I’ve been off my blog for a month or so and in that time I’ve thought of several topics that I just know you all would love to read about.  They’re knocking around in my head like an army of demented squirrels and the competition is fierce as I sit here now trying to choose among them. So . . .

Would you like to know about our eighteen-year-old granddaughter who visited all during July? How in her grown up face I still see the giggly toddler, the energetic third grader and the edgy middle schooler in dreadlocks? She was the first of the grandchildren I set up on the kitchen counter and said, “Promise me you won’t get any older.” Each had lived all of three years at the time. Each has defied that direct order and grown on. Some Field Marshall I am! How can I be so sad and so happy about that all at the same time?

Maybe you’d rather read about the black eye. Or eyes, I should say. Our youngest son, a little friend of our Anna and myself each sported one this summer. Son got clobbered by a golf club as he was instructing his five-year- old at miniature golf “Give it a good whack, Sierra”. The following week it was me. I skittered across our patio (thank you slippery sandals!) and smacked into the screen door knob catching it just below my right eye. OUCH! And ugly black, purple, blue and red. Just gimme ice and avert your eyes, please. Little friend also had an eyeball encounter with a golf club and now has her right leg in a cast from a trampoline accident. Yeesh, we live in dangerous times.

Our garden is awesome this year in spite of an appalling lack of rain. I’ll be canning up a storm in August and September. I’m especially eager to see if the grape leaves work. They’re supposed to keep my dill pickles crisp. According to my Internet research, that is. We have wild grape vines everywhere. They often eye the house shutters as a possible bridge to the stars. They do climb.

I taught four of the grandkids Pounce this year. It’s an old family card game I used to play with my mom, sisters and Aunt Marie. Kind of like double solitaire, but gets pretty hairy when four people are trying to get the two of clubs onto the only ace in the middle of the table. Lots of yelling and laughing. We hope to incite a Pounce  Tournament at the family reunion at Rumbling Bald Resort next summer in North Carolina. I’m still pretty good so I hope there’s money involved.

No, no. None of these topics will do. So – I’ll announce the contest I promised at the end of June. Except I haven’t got that all figured out yet. But look for it by the end of the week. K?

How’s your summer going?