Tag: family

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Overlooking Albuquerque

As we completed half of Route 66 in the summer of 2023, we took the Sandia Peak Tramway to the top of the mountain to get an aerial view of Albuquerque. We’d decided to fly into Chicago and home from Albuquerque, having rented a car with my husband’s brother and sister in law to complete a little more than half the journey that summer.

From this vista, you can see the entire city of Albuquerque and surrounding areas. It’s a magnificent view of the west, and I highly recommend it.

Sandia Peak Tramway

Albuquerque’s peak

(you can almost touch the clouds)

Sandia Tramway

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The Big Texan Steakhouse – Amarillo, Texas

Another great stop on our Route 66 trip was The Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo, Texas. It’s one of those places where you can get a free meal if you can eat a ton of food in a certain amount of time. We didn’t attempt that, but I can testify to the delicious food and the western atmosphere of the place. Plus, their gift shop has some of the best Route 66 souvenirs we found between Chicago and Albuquerque!

The Big Texan

Big Texan Steakhouse

don’t overstuff yourself, though,

on a long car ride!

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Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

Our host for the third and final day of the July Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is Glenda Funk of Idaho, who inspires us to write clerihews. A clerihew has four lines with an aabb rhyme scheme and focuses on a person. You can read more about this form and read the poems of others here. Like Glenda, I took liberty with the poem. I created mine about a group of people rather than just one person.

My People

community of writers
inspiration igniters
fine-tune words through a lens
as we breathe through our pens

In keeping with my travel theme for July, I’ve also unearthed a photo of our trip to Colonial Williamsburg from July 1976. Hard to believe that this was taken a half century ago, but here we are. We’ve come a long way, Baby……but I’m not sure whether we’ve moved forward or backward.

Colonial Williamsburg, 1976

While Mom was taking this photo, my brother, Dad and I were posing on a cannon in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia in 1976, during the nation’s 200th birthday month. Like so many families nationwide, we visited our nation’s capital and Colonial Virginia during this iconic year in our nation’s history.

Cannonball

family cannon

snapshots, time-stamping our place

in this history

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Journey Through Reading

I feel deep gratitude for the seeds of my sprouting love of poetry from an early age. A Child’s Garden of Verses (received as Christmas gifts in both 1971 and 1972) by Robert Louis Stevenson and Childcraft Volume 1 Poems and Rhymes are the books of poetry that made me love poems so much that I hid in my closet with a flashlight to read them. I had a sleeping bag and pillow set up much like a tent or secret fort, and that was my poetry hideout. A cozy nook, away from the noise of the house and the cares of the world.

Here is a Shadorma (3/5/3/3/7/5 syllable pattern) using a selection of words from some of my favorite childhood poems.

Windy Verse

lion-like

usher of the month

windy roars

fiercest storms

step into this poetry~

it’s a real word storm!

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Priorities….or Polarities?

Today, I am writing from a prompt in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. This card asks us to make a list of our priorities – – what pulls us in different directions, and what is our strength and our weakness. And thenI reread it….wait, no, the card says polarities. I first read it as priorities. Let’s give a rhyming hashtag poem a whirl today!

Polarities

#firstthisway

#thenthat

#theydon’tneedme

#…..untiltheydo

#pusheast

#pullwest

#nottheleast

#notthebest

#shove left

#shuffleright

#workallday

#dreamallnight

…..and turn off the alarm and keep dreaming

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Disney Dads

Back in 1974, we took a vacation to Walt Disney World with another family who were close friends of my parents. At that time, Dad was the pastor of First Baptist Church on St. Simons Island, Georgia, and his friend Joe Fennell was the husband of the organist in our church. Our mothers were close friends. In fact, when I hadn’t had chicken pox by the time they wanted me to have it before I got older, their children got it and our mother arranged for us to go and play with them so that we would contract it. Tiffany, standing third from left in this photo (next to me, the tallest kid in the green shirt) freely shared her germs. I kept a scar right between the eyes well into my teens from a popped pox.

The popcorn cart reminded me of the popped pox as I sort through pictures of travel this month. While I’m not particularly a fan of amusement parks, we made such wonderful memories there even when the Disney parade was nothing but a few characters walking down Main Street without lights and music and all the thrills of a big parade.

Disney, 1974

Popcorn, Pox, Pops

Disney popcorn cart

between-eyes popped chicken pox

posing with two Pops

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Juneau, Alaska

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be on a glacier with all this heat in the Southeastern United States today? We were there several years ago, and we took a helicopter ride to Mendenhall Glacier, where we got to ride with the sled dogs. Fun fact: they pee and poop on the run. Meeting the next generation of Iditarod and other sled racing dogs was a highlight of that trip!

Sled Team

Mendenhall Glacier

riding with the sled team dogs

Alaskan sporting!

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Saguaro Cactus

In February, we traveled out west to visit one of our daughters in Nevada. We saw beautiful deserts with sunset skies in violet purples, tangerine oranges, buttery and vibrant yellows, and deep rose reds. Many of the cactus plants looked as if they were singing praise to their maker. I painted a watercolor picture, but it did not turn out at all, so here is a photo I did not take that shows better what I had tried to capture in color.

Silhouette of a tall cactus with two arms in a desert at sunset with colorful clouds

Holy Hands

Saguaro Cactus

praising purple sunset skies

raising holy hands

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A Light Unto My Path

Today, I’m blessed to host the Spiritual Journey Thursday 2026 for the month of July. Our group was asked to reflect and meditate on this phrase: “a light unto my path.” I invite your reflections and blog posts today as we consider the light that guides our way.

“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105) serves as a reminder that divine wisdom and scripture act as daily, step-by-step guidance to help navigate the dark or uncertain moments of life.

when we travel deep

dark paths of uncertainty

His Word is the light

One of my favorite helpful resources for when I’m reading God’s Word has always been a concordance. Long before the many online versions of this resource emerged when internet use became more popular, I had a hard copy of a concordance and a study Bible with illuminated footnotes. No matter what popped up in my day or my season, I had a resource to guide me to just the right places in scripture to hear the words my heart needed. Today, there are even alphabetized lists for every topic imaginable, like this one.

In the happiest of times, it feels joyful to praise God for His many blessings. Life goes along without bumps, we go to work, cook dinner, take weekend trips, and meet friends for book club chats. We say morning prayers, “praying folks up” on the way to work like we are building prayer credit in Heaven to remain covering our loved ones even when God calls us home. Yes, I do that.

But in the darkest of times, even in the pit of a world up-ended when all the rubble is still falling, even when we can’t see five feet in front of us or think clearly, scripture and prayer are God’s guiding forces to help steer us through every cavern, every storm, every place of darkness – no matter how hopeless life can seem at times. He is our lantern and our guide. He shows us our blessings even in our struggles.

We pray without ceasing for God’s Word to light our paths forward – on days of joy, and on days of sadness, on days of peace and days of turmoil. He is there, lighting our path.