Tall Grass Again

It amazes me how grass that was brown and crunchy under foot can revive and grow seed heads that are almost knee high in less than a week’s time.

VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL. As you know, our Vacation Bible School was last week. The focus of this year’s VBS was all about trusting God, no matter what. I think everyone enjoyed it a lot because they kept coming back. I’m not sure, but I think this was our most well attended VBS ever. We averaged 220 with about 140 of those being kids.

Thursday night was family night at VBS. We had a good crowd of families there and after the program we went outside for hot dogs and games. Toward the end we noticed storm clouds and lightning on the horizon so we rushed to clean everything up. By the time the boys and I got home we had one of the worst thunder storms hit that I’ve seen in a long time. The weather alerts on TV were saying the storm was capable of producing 70 mph winds. Vicki and Jenna got in a bit later, drenched and having had to go around a tree that was down across half the road.

The storm lasted all night and left us almost four inches of rain before it blew itself out the next morning. What I didn’t know was that Mom and Aunt Mar were without power for about 12 hours. Our lights had blinked a lot as lightning hit the power lines, but never went out. With all that activity I didn’t want to be holding a phone when the next one hit.

THE THRESHERMEN’S SHOW. The Threshermen’s Show was this weekend. We didn’t make it on Friday as I needed to work and the kids all had dental appointments, however, we all loaded up in the van and went yesterday. We got there in time for the kids to ride with their cousins in the parade. We left pretty soon after lunch, much to Ben’s chagrin, so that we could come home and finish de-decorating from VBS.

I’m always proud to see the engine and thresher run well. The engine is 88 years old now so it’s an accomplishment for Charlie to keep it in good running order. Charlie is also training his younger son, Nate, to run the engine and I thought he did very well. Uncle Paul would be proud of his great grandson.

THE WINDBLOWN LOOK. Switching to my son now, Nate loves to ride with the window down. He makes me so mad in the wintertime. I’ll pick them up from Aunt Mar’s after work and down goes the window. It doesn’t matter that it’s 20° outside, as soon as I start the truck down goes the window. And he love to hang his head out the window like a dog -- as much as his seatbelt will allow. (I’ve warned him that one of these days he’s going to meet a low flying june bug which is not at all fun.)

We were driving home from White House the other day and Nate had his window down. It was pleasant so I had mine down too. Of course, he made the whole trip with arms resting on the windowsill and his head sticking out the window.

The point of this story is Nate’s hair. Most of the time it just looks wild because he’s looking all around, but on this particular trip he was resting his head on his arms and not moving so the wind styled his hair very nicely with a part down the side. We all commented that it was a nice look for him. He seemed to like it as well.

Skip to Sunday morning when we were getting ready for church. Nate came to be with the hairbrush and I suggested we try parting his hair like the wind did. He was game to try so I went to work. Obviously I am not hairstylist because after checking out my work in the mirror he had me redo it saying, “If I stick my head out of the window it would do a better job.”

Joe