Monday Memories

Many years ago my family moved to Miami, Florida.  It was a challenging period.  During our time there, one brother graduated high school and moved away to college, one sister decided to skip her senior year and do early enrollment in college (not as common at that time as it is now), and one sister finished college and came back home to live while she worked and waited to be able to move overseas to the mission field.  Whew.  Talk about a life-changing three years!

When we left there and moved back to upstate South Carolina, my Dad moved from pastoring a church to finding, building and establishing a camp and conference center.  That meant that we did not have a manse to live in.

We had some dear friends, however, who had a mountain lake colony cottage.  They found out about our situation and very graciously allowed us to live there for a season.  That was one of my best springs ever.  It was a little cottage in the woods with a creek in the back.  It was a rather cool spring, so the weather was just what you would imagine a mountain spring ought to be.  The dogwoods, daffodils and mountain laurel bloomed right on time.  The cottage came with lake-privileges, so we could go fishing, swimming and canoeing whenever we wanted the work got done.

The most fascinating thing to me about this house though, was the porches.  The man who lived here had a son.  Every summer he and his son would design and build another porch.  There were porches connected by walkways (some of which went over the creek), porches that wrapped around full-grown trees, screened porches, porches that had steps going up and porches that had steps going down.  In my memory I am sure that I have elaborated on these porches beyond what they really were, but it was lots of fun to live there for a while. 

Dad on one of the smaller walkways.