We are wrapping up a trip to my folks, a four-day visit to the ancestral stomping grounds, and I do mean ancestral. I’ve been brushing up on a few branches of the family tree. Turns out there are parts of my family that have been in northwestern Alabama when the state was merely a territory.
We arrived late Friday, just in time to go to sleep. Woke up Saturday and had a casual day of it. After church yesterday we spent the afternoon with my grandmother. She gave me another branch of the family tree to look into. And then we went to a nearby cemetery and found the grave of my great-great-grandfather.
Apparently, no one knew where he was buried. I figured it out online from a few hundred miles away, thanks to the Internet. After about six minutes of walking through neatly mown grass in the twilight I found the actual marker. You can’t miss it, really. I’m not sure how no one in the family knew. The marker just has his first and middle initials rather than his full name, though, so I suppose that’s part of it. Anyway, there he is, marked by a stone that tells the tell in just seven letters and a few numbers. He died more than a half-century before I was born. He was younger than I am now. He probably worked harder than I ever will. And there, next to him, is his wife, my great-great-grandmother, who died 24 years before I was born. I don’t know anything about them, otherwise, or, today at least, what their parents names were, but I’ve at least proven they existed. I’ve driven by their cemetery all of my life and didn’t know they were there.
Today was a pool day and a cookout day and a dodge the rain day. We went for a quick bike ride and then helped cleaned and then entertained the kids and then jumped in and out of the pool and ducked thunderstorms. I taught a three-year-old how to swim, sort of. It was a fine day, all told, then.
And we’re back here, as well! Back to the old Monday through Friday schedule. And here are a few June pictures to wrap up the month before … well, July 4th … when we’ll be … pretty much stuck in the car all day … So, yeah, enjoy some pictures!
This is a flower on campus that I walk by regularly. There’s really nothing special to it. I was trying to get the ants to cooperate with my phone’s almost-focal length. But I think the pollen became more interesting in the end:
We rode our bikes a fair amount, of course. This is a picture we took on our anniversary, actually. I thought it was nice of The Yankee to slow down and let me catch up:
She’s a nice person like that.
Allie is hard at work, just so you know:
I took this shot the other night at 8:50 p.m. There is a summertime advantage of living so far to the west in the Eastern Time Zone:
Later, that same night, I took this picture:
It is a fine perk, really.
