Wordless Wednesday

 A few photos I've been meaning to share.

The hiking trail in entrance to the hoodoos at Bryce National Park, Utah,

By Todie Franklin Hess, Blue Ridge of NC

Sunrise at Toroweap - Colorado River, Grand Canyon, Arizona

Looking out through Treehouse Shop window at the pottery fair in Dillsboro, NC 2013

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Sharing with Wordless Wednesday

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Yesterday I had a sad conversation with my care coordinator, who I've spoken with monthly by phone for maybe 4 years. I was emotional. The practice is closing here in Black Mountain. I told Rob that he knows more about me than anyone else. It's like having a husband without the rigamarole! Well, only on the medical level of course. It was so hard to say good-bye to him. Like breaking up with a boyfriend used to feel. I had to count to 3 and we both had to hang up at the same time. I wonder why I'm still a teenager.

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The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people. -Helen Adams Keller, lecturer and author (27 Jun 1880-1968)  

Three states easy breezy

Strange rust orange metal fences around Kingsport, TN

Climbing over and around mountains with blue skies and fluffy clouds

The view out Wendy Welch's store's front door in Big Stone Gap, VA

Welcome to Duffield, Duffield Daze, and Daniel Boone Heritage Trail...which includes an eagle perched on a pile of stones...lots of fun signs to look at, while being a passenger with a camera!

We got silly after 2 hours driving, and needed to stretch our legs.  Plus there was half a double wide mobile home taking up both of the lanes in front of us, going about 10 miles an hour.  Time to take a break and share smiles.

This ice is going to be around a while longer, I'm afraid.

I can't remember where NC left off and TN took over, then finally VA.  Fun trip of 2.5 hours drive each way.  And great weather too!

what?

_{Laughter is inner jogging.} 

 _{Norman Cousins}

Linnville Falls, NC

I corrected my math on yesterday's post about Sofia Elmore Ross's siblings, there were 18 in all, and I'd miss-numbered them.  Sorry about that.

My highschool friends

I am an introvert, and that means I had lots of friends, but wasn't one of those 'in-the-yearbook' kind of girls.

The Flowery One, (it doesn't help to enlarge the low res picture)

When I took a vacation in the early 2000s, I came to North Carolina (from Florida) to visit my old friend The Flowery One and her husband The Silent One.

The Flowery One and I had gone to school together back in St. Louis from 7th grade through 12th.  During those years we studied, learned about boys, played sports on teams together, dated boys, questioned everything grown-up, made out with boys, pushed boundaries sometimes, and giggled a lot.  I was even in The Flowery One's first wedding soon after high school. But in 2000, after almost 40 years apart, we again made contact because another student wanted to do a gathering of our graduating class via the internet.

Three graces come together (what? we don't look like that?)

Our other friend, The Brain, had responded to this other student that she wanted to get in touch with us, so we all made contact again.  I may have the details of this wrong, but basically we started writing emails regularly in 2000.

The Brain and I had also spent a year together in college as well as all through high school.  I had written back and forth, ("snail mail" it came to be called) with The Brain several times in my life, and always enjoyed hearing about her and her husband, The Tall One, and sharing whatever was going on in our lives, including kids.

The Brain and The Flowery One enjoying pictures and ??? as teens

My teenage friends, wearing the styles of the time, scarves, bangs and curls of hair coming toward the cheeks

The Brain, riding her scooter in 2012, having lived with MS for many years

The Flowery One several years ago, in NC

The Flowery One after treatment for cancer

The apartment complex for seniors in WA state, where The Flowery One and The Quiet One moved in 2011

The Flowery One and The Silent One, Halloween 2012

Our email let us see how many similar choices we'd made through the years, and we continued to share these common bonds. We all loved cats and had left the religion which was the sponsor of our high school.  We sent support whenever one of us went through a tough time, and we sure did continue to share our love of the silly, and cats, and humor, and Halloween, and laughs, and story telling, and creativity in lots of ways.

I've tried to keep a record of the emails we exchanged, in hopes of writing some kind of memoir of our lives.  But working with thousands of emails is very tedious, to say the very least.  You can't just turn them into computer savable documents unless you copy them out of the internet server, which I've done with many.  Most of them remain in the land of the web.

So if I guess at something, I can go looking for what one of us said back at that time.  But for purposes of these blogs, I may often just write from memory.  If something important happens though, I'll go cut and paste from the emails again!  (Unless I get enough comments saying that it's not a good idea, that is.)

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday this week.  Sorry it hasn't got a thing to do with Alan's picture idea.  But this is what I've been wanting to share for some time.