The Beach Kids

If I could choose just one place to be right this minute....it's the ocean!!

To me the ocean is symbolic of life. The power of eternity is seen in the endless horizon. The ocean brings me peace. I have often sat in the sand...gazing at the ocean with tears dripping down my cheeks, mourning the loss of my husband and shortly after the loss of my mother. I have sat ocean side many times throughout my life contemplating life's numerous challenges. For some useen reason the sound of the crashing waves around me...their rymthic pulse gives me peace in my soul. Just watching a sunset on the ocean horizon is magical and unique and there's just something indescribably romantic about it. God is never closer to me than when I'm oceanside gazing at His creation!

All that being said I now need to flip to the other side of the story. The story of The Beach Kids. Fifteen years ago my sister and I started our annual tradition of taking our grandkids to the Oregon coast for a week every summer. They soon dubbed themselves The Beach Kids.  Our first trip we had only three children and since then we have had as many as ten. It seems each year lately we loose one or two kids to the call of their teenage friends, sports camps or jobs. This year we had three teenages...two seven year olds and two nine year olds.

I didn't see a sunset...because by the time the sun would set I was nodding off in my chair.  Here is a brief snopsis of each day:

The sea gulls would start with their noise making at the crack of dawn and the younger kids would follow suit shortly after adding their noise to the medley. Soon the teenagers were up contributing their noise with music...wrestling...slugging...and teasing the little kids.

Then comes the food..or maybe I need to say there goes the food. Oh my Goodness...do they ever eat!! My sister and I have a deal...I do the cooking and she cleans up. Well I figured it out that I cooked 20 meals...fixed 231 snacks...handed out 36 bottles of water...and numerous popsicles and graham cracker treats

                                                                                 

I saved numerous kids from their teasing older cousins and siblings...I intervened in arguments regarding the nighly movie choice...I played with them on the dunes so many times that my calves now feel like someone has pounded them with a baseball bat....I marched on the sand with the little kids playing follow the leader...I helped build sand castles...I judged their castle contest...I played in the surf for two hours with seven kids...I helped bury Peter in the sand for teasing the little kids. I helped the girls build a fort.
I carried sand toys back and forth too many times to count and next year I am going to make a
few voice recordings before I leave.

 #1 Peter stop teasing the little kids. #2 Brush the sand off your feet before coming in the house. #3 Your hungry..how can that be? #4 Peter stop teasing the little kids.
#5 Yes you can have another snack. #6 Peter stop teasing the little kids

I brought home sand in my pockets and sand in my ears but I also brought more memories of another year of The Beach Kids. Yes I love the ocean..the sound...the sights...the feel...the smell. But most of all I love The Beach Kids.

I think I'm engaged!!

What a fun weekend I had!! Bluegrass music...great visit with fam....yummo food...and a marriage proposal. Anyway I think it was but since I had only know this gentleman for 15 minutes when he proposed, I'm really not sure if that's what it was.

Before my husband or 45 years passed away he gave me lots of advice on being a widow. He gave me financial advice, spiritual advice, political advice...lots of advice on what to do and what not to do...like never ever hide the remote control again...but he never did tell me don't get engaged to a man I've only known for 15 minutes.

I will call my fee-aunce-say by the name of Wally to protect his identity and his three grown children. Three beautiful children I might add. Two of them he is certain I will enjoy meeting but the other one is rather difficult. He has numerous grandkids and so do I so before we get married he informed me that there would be lots of adjustments to be made on both sides. That is the one thing that can pull a couple apart is the things that they don't get settled before they tie the knot.  He is financially stable and hopes that I am also. He lives in a small town an hour's drive from me and since that is such a long commute he thinks it's wise to get most of the hurdles out of the way right off the bat.

My fee-aunce-say is a charming gentleman but I think he is rather hard of hearing. After sitting down next to me and starting the conversation with, "I hear your a widow lady" and then his next question was, "you want to get married again"? The first time I said, "No... I'm not interested in getting married again".
Soon I realized that I needed to be firm with him or go shopping for my wedding dress because he either didn't hear me or I was being ignored. Not a good thing for my fee-aunce-say to start our relationship right off the bat by ignoring me. He asked me how old I was and then told me he was soon to be eighty-four....but don't let our age difference be a stumbling block. He's pretty active!!

Well after our 15 minute conversation my new friend picked his cane up off the ground...said goodbye...and headed to his car.

I didn't even get a ring...but I met a new friend and a person can't have too many friends.

Climbing Mount (Butte) Talbert!

I recently bought an I-phone this past month and I have patiently been learning how to use it.

So yesterday when us three senior ladies decided to climb Mt. Talbert I made a special point to be sure I had it along. I sincerely believe if not for my I-phone we might still be on top of Mt. Talbert. Wait...I'm getting ahead of myself. I enjoy stories...telling stories...writing stories...and just hearing stories. To me everything that happens in my life is just a story waiting to be told. But as I sit here at my computer I am finding it especially hard to put into words everything that happened on our second time to scale this mountain...OK its really a Butte.  But it is the largest undeveloped Butte in Northern Clackamas County. The park offers miles of hiking trails and four different trail heads. Four different trail heads? Good to know!!

We met at the church at 9:30 AM anticipating our hike and our time together. We were all looking forward to the exercise...enjoying God's creation...and chatting and catching up on each other's life.
Mistake #1...Chatting and catching up on each other's life.  We chatted all the way there...we chatted while driving...we listened..we chatted...we drove....we chatted. We arrived at the trail head thirty minutes later, strapped on our fanny packs, grabbed our water, and I grabbed my recently charged I-phone and we were off.

I love my I-phone!! It has this amazing built in GPS that navigates and helps you get anywhere you need to go. You can down load a map and it will pin point exactly where you are at any point on your hike. It's an amazing indispensable device to be in your pack before starting a mountain climb...OK a Butte climb.

We had zero time to warm up. The start of the hike was pretty steep right off the bat and we had to shift into two heel drive immediately. But soon we got in the right gear and were trudging up the mountain...OK the Butte..at a firm fast clip of about 1.1 miles per hour, taking time out every so often to take pictures of the beautiful rain forest filled with ferns and wild flowers. The trail was always very well marked with arrows marking the route. Two hours later...with full bladders...we started looking to see just how far yet to our parked car at the trail head.

There are four different trail heads? Good to know!! Did anyone note the name of ours?? We continued on with much discussion of the correct route to take and after another hour of wandering through the wilderness I realized I was miss-placed. YES...miss-placed. We exited at yet another trail head to find a hugh beautiful retirement village...you know the place where they put old people that get lost all the time. We used their restrooms and after another discussion time decided we needed to stay out of the jungle and hit the roads and maybe something will look familiar.

At the intersection of two busy highways here sits three directionally challenged..totally wiped out...ready for the retirement village...senior ladies. Our short hike was now a lesson in survival. Then I remembered my I-phone in my pack. My amazing I-phone that can direct us out. Another half hour passes while I am trying to locate where we are on this munchkin size map and me without my reading glasses. But it did tell us the name of the two streets intersecting...smart phone...we figured that out by sitting on the bench reading the road signs. I was again patting myself on the back because I had the foresight to remember to bring my oh so very smart I-phone. I picked it up and dialed my son to come and get us. I told him the sad story of how someone had stole my car while we were hiking.
Thank you God for my son.....and for my I-phone!!

A funny thing happened on my way to the rest of my life!!

I wake up each morning reminded that all I need to face the day is a fresh breath of my Lord and Saviour and then to find my way to the coffee pot. I could live without my coffee (if I had to) but I could not survive without my morning jolt of Jesus. Then I turn on my computer and my  passion...writing. Maybe it's not a passion but an addiction. I can totally relate to my writing being an addiction because once I get going I really do have a hard time stopping. Even when I was a little girl I can remember writing silly little poems to my Mom and I would tell her, "I'm going to be a writter of words when I grow up". How is it that a litttle five year old can engage in such a complex thinking process years before I was even capable of surviving on my own? I couldn't wait to grow up and get on with my life. I wanted to experience everything. Still do!! Why is it I wonder we always want something we don't have or to be something or someone we're not?  When growing up I wanted to be a famous sports star....a movie star...I wanted to be thinner (still do)...I wanted to be older. I wanted to be eleven when I was six....then sixteen when I was thirteen..then twenty-one when I was eighteen. I finally came to my sences and now I want to be younger. What was I thinking!! I remember when all I had to do was crawl...come on think back...you too can remember those days. I had it made. I was carried everywhere. Grown-ups would jump to meet my every need. I perfected my whine at an early age. All I needed to do was whine a bit and the whole world revolved around me. Oh...those were the days my friend!! But I couldn't leave well enough alone, no I had to try walking, and at what cost. Falling over and over again until I could stand on my own two feet and then I could walk on my own. Then not happy again I decided I needed to learn to run. You get the picture!!

There is something inside us that drives us. Call it ambition, passion, rebellion, competition, independence...whatever...it's there from the beginnning. A God given drive to move forward, our souls crave progress.

Then a funny thing happened...well not laughing funny...but wierd funny. I'm all grown up now and like my young neice asked me yesterday, "why can't grandma's run". Oh man...the one thing I was really good at too!!  Actually I'm more than all grown up....I'm really almost grown UP!! I've been confronting my future lately. What is my future? Is there hope for a real future without my husband of many years? He defined me and gave me purpose. But hope pulls me forward into the future, whatever that holds. Where there is no hope there is no future. I believe hope is the oxygen for the soul!!

We are saved by trusting, and trusting means looking forward to getting something we don't yet have. Romans 8:24

My soul doesn't crave something from God, my soul craves God!!  ...and by the way... so does yours.

A PROMISE KEPT

A friend of mine has a sailboat named Promise and he has been promising me a sail on Promise. He kept his promise and took me sailing on Sunday. Oh how I do love sailing!! But I must admit that the whole sailing thing is more than a tad confusing. My question is why must they change the name of everything on the boat? A rope is only a rope when it doesn't have a function. After it is assigned a function it's name is changed. That had to be the grand idea of a man!! The rope that is attached to the sails to control their shape are called sheets....and when you adjust the sails shape it's called trimming the sheets...ropes that raise the sheets are not ropes..they are called halyards. Now I'm not a man or a sailor for sure but I'm thinking wouldn't it be easier to just call them what they are?

On the open sea the captain needs to know at all times that his crew or mate obeys his every command without question. It's a matter of life and death!! So with all that in mind you can see if the skipper's mate is given the command to "trim the sheets" she would automatically find the scissors and go to the aft cabin and trim his sheets. Aft...that the rear cabin in case you are wondering.

It's so easy to get confused with all the sailboat speak.

When the captain tells me that unless we get some wind we will need to be "tacking"...and from what I understood from him it is hard work and something he really doesn't want to do. So explain Captain sir...what is tacking? Unless I have a weakling for a skipper I'm reasonably sure it has nothing to do with tacks on a bulletin board. Tacking is the act of changing the direction of the sailboat by heading the bow into the wind and it requires a zigzag motion in the water. Then when the Captain asked me to take the helm (that's boat speak for drive this thing) while he went below to the head ...I was totally and utterly confused. He had just informed me previously that the head of the boat was called the bow and now he going below to the head. But since he did seem in a bit of a hurry I decided that now was not the time to correct his boat speak. Will I ever be sea worthy?

Now back to the statement I made in the previous paragraph. "The Captain asked me to drive this boat while he went below to the head". I came to the conclusion while I was driving the boat and he went to the head that my Captain is a weakling!! Tacking is not hard work at all...I was zigzagging the whole time he was below and it wasn't hard at all. That zigzag maneuver was no problem for me!! Keep in mind the sails were down.

The little boat we drag behind us is called a dinghy and the rope that hauls the little boat is called a painter. Since they insist on renaming everything I don't think it's entirely my fault that we lost the cute little boat. We never used it anyway so I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. When he said check the painter and be sure it isn't tangled I got so totally confused with all the boat speak. Trim the sheets...check the painter...check the head sail...the head of the boat is the bow. Anybody would get confused with all those commands. Is it any wonder I cut the painter and peed in the bow of the boat!!

I accidentally bought another jacket!!

What is it when you shop that you can't resist?  OK come on women ...admit it. I know there are some things you just can't resist. I have a very frugal/thrifty/green friend who admits to washing and reusing plastic bags and she also saves plastic grocery bags, cuts in strips and proceeds to crochet a purse. What a woman!! But my very frugal friend also did admit just recently to being a shopaholic at times. She counted her socks at moving time and admittted to 54 pairs of socks. For someone who most of the tiime goes barefoot I would say she has a sock fettish.

Another good friend of mine accused me of being a jacket  junkie. So yesterday I set out to disprove her theory and decide to count my jackets. So now my question is... do sweat shirts count as a jacket? I Googled...what is a sweat shirt? Google's description of a sweat shirt is a garmet intended to cover the torso and arms. A jacket is clothing for the upper body. Since they both are intended to cover the upper body I probably should count them all together. My favorite color used to be black...so I have 4 black jackets. (my sister-in-law says black is not a color) I also love white (she also says white is not a color)
I have 3 white jackets. The new color this season is that lime green that I have went crazy for...3 lime green jackets. Navy is another color that goes with anything...2 navy's. Last year my favorite color yellow....I really, really, really like yellow. ..5 yellow. Everyone woman needs at least one red jacket to wear during the Christmas season...I only have 2 red ones. Pink...only 1.  Then I have 6 jacket/sweatshirts of different colors not mentioned here. So now I am re-thinking everything as I realize I probably am a jacket junkie...since I counted twenty-six...oh now I'm wondering if I should have included my coats. Probably not!!

I had a good laugh at my friend who collect's socks but likes to go bare-footed...and here I am with numerous jackets...and I am constantly hot these days. Go figure!!

A smile...

Hello my friend....your smile creeps from the words on the telephone screen and dangles

just for a moment on my fingers...catches breath and then snakes

up my hand tickling as it darts inside my sleeve...up my

shoulder...pauses to tickle my ear lobe and then

treks up to my eyebrow...then dives into

the brown pool of my eye...creating

lovely ripples that lights up all

that is inside and outside

one more smile please...

just for the other

eye!!