Dinner Guests and Memories!

We had guests for dinner last evening, and very special ones at that! As one quarantined week has melted into the next for oh-so-many, it's easy to lose track of how lonely one is becoming and how repetitive each day-to-day has been. What perfect joy it was to welcome family from the Capital City, even for just a few hours. On an otherwise unseasonably cold and dismal, rainy, day we had our own personal injection of sunshine with the arrival of our daughter, son-in-law and oldest two grandchildren!  I do believe that feeling was mutual. 

Hannes enjoyed having an extra snuggle partner too!

Mason and I played Chinese Checkers, he won. I have wanted to have this game ready to play ever since we began building the porch, its a warm and fuzzy memory for me that goes back fifty-plus (+++!😉) years. When I was a little girl I remember summer afternoons spent playing this game on my grandparents screened in porch with my great-grandmother when she came to visit them. 

This is my great-grandmother (Grandma) and me a few years before those game-playing hours spent on the porch. She lived near Boston, in a home for "Aged Women" (!?!).  She would come to visit my grandparents, by train, for a week in the summer every year (and then again for Thanksgiving weekend). I can still recall riding along to pick her up at the depot. Boston really wasn't that far away at all (30-35 miles); but, in those days, this was the normal method of travel and it was Grandma's way. My grandparents' home was next door to ours and I would walk through the field every day after lunch while she was staying with them to spend time with Grandma over that Chinese Checkers board. She was always dressed up: dress, jewelry, stockings and tall, lace-up shoes with heels. I was in the seventh grade when she died; my grandfather, her son, passed away a year before she did. 

Mr. G. is currently making a custom sized drop-leaf table for our porch space, it's where the Chinese Checkers and other puzzles and pastimes will live. This table project has been side-lined, temporarily, while he's taking care of an injured shoulder. I don't know that my Grandma ever knew how fondly I remember spending time with her; it's one of my greatest hopes that our grandchildren will have warm memories of spending time at our home. 

Adapting in an upside-down🙃 world: Today I had my scheduled shopping appointment at our LQS. Believe it or not, I almost missed it! Wouldn't you know it, the only place I had to be (except for that dentist appointment) in the last two months and I had hastily scrawled the appointment time in two separate places, for two different times!?! My appointment was actually supposed to be at 11:00 AM. I had written that time down in the kitchen; in the studio, on my planner, I had written down 1:00 PM! Thank goodness I got a phone call at approximately 11:20 inquiring where I was. I grabbed my prepared list, hopped in the car, and got there in time to grab what I needed. Really. 🙄 Tomorrow we enter Phase 2 of reopening the state. Stay safe my friends, be patient with the process, and wash your hands 🧼. 

"And you will feel secure, because there is hope;

you will look around and take your rest in security." - Job 11:18

Life is Good!