Reflections

July 2006 our family at Cape Canaveral  P arenting was an on-the-job training exercise for Elizabeth and me. I remember the first dirty diaper (about twenty minutes after Ashton was born). There I was, a 25 years old with what I thought was the daunting task of cleaning this foreign material that was in the cutest little diaper. It didn’t take me long to become a professional posterior disinfectant specialist. I look back on those days with incredible fondness. We were post-kids having kids. Like the trip we took to Cape Canaveral in 2006 seeing the Discovery take off, its been amazing  to watch them launch into adulthood.  I look at my children today and take great pride in the young adults they have become. I would love to say “we did good”, but maturity gives me the retrospective to understand it was God-Us-Family. I have a friend who asked me recently what I thought made good parenting. While my answer wasn’t exhaustive, I offered him some ideas that w...

Miss Ella Reading Her Bible at the Store. Grandmaw, as we called her, was born March 21, 1908. I think about her every spring as we leave winter and enter the budding spring. Living the unique life of having your grandmother sharing a house with your parents creates a special experience for a young man. I understood homemade biscuits, daily. I enjoyed the pride she took in making my bed sheets so taut on Sunday afternoons. She ran a country store just down the street from our house. Everyday around 7:15 she would walk down the street to work; rain or shine. This continued until she was 87.   She warmed the little German lap sided building with wood supplied by the neighboring lumber company. It was a unique environment where you drank sodas from a bottle and occasionally you’d pour Planter’s peanuts into a coke. There was a spittoon beside the cast iron wood stove. Neighbors, farmers and church goers would gather to talk about the weather, crops and community happenings. ...