Well, here we are at Stop #18 on our Summer Tour of 2013.
It's our favorite stop on our travels every summer: our son Joel's little property in the southeastern corner of Ohio! He's gradually turning his five acres of hilly woodland from wilderness to home, sweet home! Once or twice each summer, we stop by to help him out for a week or so.
We consider our visits to his place weeks of physical therapy for us, a muscle-stretching change from sitting in the truck all day traveling. For example, there are always trees to trim:
LOTS of trees to trim!
The old farm truck has seen better days and is no longer road-worthy.
But it can still haul loads of tree branches to the burn pile -- if you only turn to the right, that is!
Mary Sue is not sitting around watching soap operas (no TV coverage!) and eating bon-bons (not sugar free!) all day. No, she, too, is hard at work.
There are many, many flower beds around the house and they are ALWAYS weedy! So, she takes it as her personal mission to pull weeds. (She used to pull all of the weeds but doesn't anymore. She leaves the pretty and harmless weeds to help keep the soil from eroding!) But the patches of grass and the dandelions MUST come out of the flower beds before they take over.
Many of the stalks of grass were taller than the flowers; some nearly as tall as I am. Their roots went so deep that some of them came up speaking Chinese! When they saw the light of day, they immediately asked for political asylum. I couldn't promise that, but I knew they would not be going back to China!
The dandelions were thick, and huge. If there ever was a dandelion contest at the county fair, I'm sure they would have won a blue ribbon! I took no pity on them, however; they got tossed into the burn pile like the grass. I did suggest to Joel that if he could find a market for them, they might make a good cash crop for him.
Oh, and of course, there are yards and pastures to keep mowed.
You may be thinking that our annual weeks of tree-trimming, weed-pulling, and grass-mowing therapy sound as if our son is the only one who benefits from our visits. Not so!
Every visit he does many small repair projects for us. This year it was a major improvement to the kitchen in our coach: he installed this set of sliding shelves in our pantry cupboard so we can finally see what we have stored without standing on our heads or kneeling to search with a flashlight!
What a welcome improvement!
We have two more major improvement projects planned for the coming week-end, but then we must be on our way traveling east. There's a limit to how much of this "physical therapy" our old bodies can tolerate. But we'll be back later in the summer.
