Teenagers are a bit crazy. It’s a well-known fact. My sister and I proved this one summer as we traveled by bus from Northeast Texas to Charleston, West Virginia. We were eighteen and sixteen, on the road for thirty-six hours to visit close family friends. It was the first time my parents had sent any of us on this kind of trip. We’d all gone away to camp at one time or another. I had spent the summer away when I was fourteen. But this was different. This was before the cell phone (there was life before cell phones?) so there was no way to keep in contact along the way. They put us on a ... Read the Post
Archives for March 2011
Seasons
It was a brisk March morning as I walked along the tree-lined sidewalk near our home. My dog snuffled along beside me, his nose intent on anything and everything squirrel. Florida winters are milder than much of the rest of the country, so our fall season happens about mid-winter. I noticed each live oak we walked past was at a different stage in its seasonal cycle. Some of the trees were completely bare -- their spindly, gray-brown branches naked -- and I shivered from the bold reminder of winter. Other trees were already decorated with tiny, bright mint-green buds of new life. “Here’s ... Read the Post
Happy in Any State
For most of my life, my family moved. A lot. I’ve lost count of how many times but I can still recite most of the addresses and a few of the phone numbers. The summer I turned sixteen, my family made a major move. We lived in a rural area of central Pennsylvania. My father wanted to finish Bible college to get his degree to pastor. After months of prayer, God led him to a Bible college in northeast Texas. Yes, you read that correctly. We moved from Pennsylvania to Texas. If there can be more polar opposites than those two places and still be in the United States, I haven’t seen them yet. ... Read the Post
Hiccup Distractions
I was driving in the car with my kids, and my oldest son who is six said that he had the hiccups. He was pretty upset over them and begged me for a remedy. Since I was driving and there’s not much you can do for hiccups, I started telling him to do random things. “Hold your breath, wave your arms and then yell as loud as you can,” I said. He did this and nothing happened. “Look out the window and cough twenty times then stomp your feet for one minute.” Again the hiccups came back. “Try to make yourself sneeze,” I finally added, “hoping that would distract him long enough to quiet his ... Read the Post
Weeds
We were driving along US 301 one sunny spring morning when my son, Cole, commented, “Those are really tall, pretty flowers.” Construction crews had just paved a large sidewalk next to the road and no one had mowed the tall grass alongside it yet. Recent heavy rain and the constant Florida sunshine lent a beautiful, healthy flourish to all the vegetation. I glanced toward the flowers and frowned in surprise. Instead of flowers, I saw wave after wave of tall, spindly weeds growing along the road, reaching over the new sidewalk. I commented back to him, “Those are actually weeds.” He was ... Read the Post