When you can only see your limits in the rearview mirror...

This summer, I have discovered my limits. I knew it even before I hopped in a carpool headed 800 miles to D.C. for a conference, leaving the tablet, which had all the presentations I was giving and all the music I was playing that week under the driver’s seat of my car.

“Did you at least see your limits before you reached them?” asked a sweet friend who saved my butt by loaning me a tablet to use for the week.

“Um, no,” I said. “My limits are waaaay in the rearview mirror!”

I have officially hit the busiest part of my summer, so I’m going to leave you today with a story I wrote a while back from growing up on the farm. When you read Trust Falls, you’ll understand why I’m sharing this.

The night before I started high school, I knew I wanted to make a good impression. I was coming into the public high school from the Catholic school and I knew almost no one. There were 16 in my 8th grade class; one had moved away (my only friend) and 2-3 went to other schools. I was coming in with no one but my big sister.

So I took a shower, put my hair up in curlers so they’d dry in banana curls, got in my pink gingham-checkered nightgown that looked more like a dress, and went outside to sit on the front porch and read while the sun went down.

And then I heard it.

There are few sounds quite so readily identifiable as cattle who have broken through the fence and are not happy about it. I can’t explain why, but for some reason when one of them gets out, all of them follow, and then all of them are REALLY UPSET.

Of course, they don’t like to be herded back in, either.

And so it was that I spent the evening before starting high school tromping through tall grass in a gingham nightgown with curlers in my hair, helping my parents and my sisters chase cattle back into the pasture.

Stay tuned.

For now…

It has not been a good month for photography. These are mobile photos, not camera ones. Taken by a “travel phone” so inadequate, it lives in the drawer any time I’m not needing it for, y’know, travel logistics. (I mean, I don’t want a smart phone anyway, so this is a good one for me—it is an anti-motivator! :) )Still, I got some glimpses of beauty on that tablet-free cross-country road trip.

Oh! And maybe you’d like a peek at what ended that crazy tablet-free week… my daughter competing in the national Miss Amazing pageant.

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