If you’ve followed this blog for a while… did you notice that a couple of months ago the blog sort of got weird all of a sudden? Where did the cute family stories go? Lately, it’s mostly been recipes around here… The recipes have been good, but this blog just isn’t the same without stories about a software-engineer-turned-farmer and his family!
Well my friends, that’s because this blog was on automatic pilot for a while. But now we’re back and I want to tell you where we’ve been!
About two months ago, Papa the Farmer got a phone call one afternoon from a friend who lives in Tennessee. “Can you come help me do some construction work?” our friend asked. After those tornadoes went through Tennessee earlier this year there were a lot of houses that needed repair.
It’s strange. We have many friends in Tennessee and had been wanting to go to go there for several months. Every time an opportunity to go there came up, some necessary thing didn’t line up and we weren’t able to go. This time God lined everything up for us and we were able to go, even though it was very short notice! I was even completely caught up in laundry and so we were able to just throw some clothes into a suitcase, jump in the van and go. We left the next morning.
Our friends are building a house and so while our husbands worked, we mommies camped out at the property with our children. Their property is in the valley between two ridges of mountains. Look at this view from what-will-be her back porch:
We are in the middle of a Texas summer heat wave. Everything is crispy and brown so all that luscious green was a delight to my soul! And that beautiful, large garden (on the right)? Vegetables just don’t grow that well here in Texas! (Oh! And in case you’re wondering… those boxes in the middle of the photo are beehives… So we had fresh honey straight from the honeycomb every day! What a treat!)
Don’t you think the only thing it’s missing to make it perfect is a little mountain stream trickling down from those mountains? Oh wait! Running along the edge of the property was my little creek!
Now doesn’t that look like a great place to play on a hot summer’s day?
But wait! You haven’t seen the coolest thing about their property yet! Check this out!
Just between their property and the mountains was this patch of trees on a hill. What’s so interesting about that you ask? Well, on that hill are three oblong piles of stones… graves left over from the civil war. How did they get there? Who are they? Was there a battle of some sort in this valley? It would make sense that the survivors would drag the bodies of their fallen comrades into this hidden grove of trees where they could bury them and perhaps perform some sort of last rites over their dead bodies. Or maybe they were wounded in battle and dragged here to recover, but they died anyway.
“I want to be right here on the resurrection day so that I can find out who is in there!” I told my friend.
“Are you crazy?” she asked. “What if they’re bad ol’ boys? Anyway, you’ll have more important things to think about on the resurrection morning that that.”
**sigh** I suppose. But still, the mystery of it all intrigues me.
So, that was the first stop on our trip. What great fun we had staying with our friends for two whole weeks! Did I mention that between the two of us we had six children under the age of 6! Never a dull moment! I love my children and I love her children so I was in hog-heaven!
(Please excuse their mucky faces, fingers and feet! They’re camping!)
Oh, and just a little “P.S.” Aren’t these two so sweet-looking together? I took this picture just in case they want to get married one day. Not that I’m going to pressure them or anything. But just in case…. cuz if that happened, I wouldn’t mind!
