Went to visit the grandchildren on Thursday. Spent the night so I could attend the boys’ band concerts. Amazing how much better the children play after a year’s instruction. Learning to play a musical instrument is amazing and so much fun. I drove up Thursday around lunch. The sky was blue and pretty. Saw some newly planted vegetable gardens and some gardens with rows of plants already up. The trees have all greened out and the landscape was so pretty. Drove home this morning to a gray cloudy sky spitting rain drops every now and then.

I love to ride with the kids to school in the mornings and go with my daughter-in-law to pick up the boys at the middle school in the afternoons. My granddaughter rides the bus home in the afternoons and has a special smile for me when she sees me at the bus stop. I took Handley a little wooden grandmother doll and a little rabbit and guinea pig hutch for her wooden doll house. We had a few minutes last night to play with the doll house. We named all the little wooden chickens in the doll house chicken coop. Now we’re thinking up names for the rabbit and guinea pig. Such a cute toy.

When she’s a grown woman with her own grandchildren, I hope she remembers us playing with the doll house and has a laugh about watching me getting up from the floor. I tried to be a model Southern grandmother this visit. Last visit I showed the children how to be a walrus with the chop sticks at the sushi restaurant. Didn’t realize Thomas and Ashley were watching! This visit I promised them I’d behave on our trip to the mountains later this summer. Their reply was, “Just don’t bring any Whoopi cushions!”

This morning after we took the children to school we went out to eat breakfast at a cute little restaurant in Peachtree City. Enjoyed having a special moment with Thomas and Ashley. And the breakfast was delicious! I headed back home when we got back to their house. I had a perfect two day visit and made some memories to file away.

Yesterday waiting in line at the boys’ school I saw a mockingbird attacking a squirrel. The mockingbird must have had a nest in the tree. Every time the squirrel would try to climb the tree the mockingbird would swoop down and peck him. This went on for a few minutes till the squirrel ran off to another tree. I was curious and read up on birds and squirrels. Squirrels do eat eggs and baby birds if the parents are away from the nests. Did not know that fact.

I saw barn swallows and mocking birds and crows and geese on this trip. Lots of deer walked through their backyard at dusk yesterday. Tickles me how their dog Magnolia just sits on the top steps of the porch and watches them walk by. She understands the concept of the fence between them and doesn’t waste her barks.

I sat on the porch after I got home this morning. The sky was layered with light gray rain clouds and spots of blue sky and puffy dark clouds with bleached white edges. All my plants were standing at attention like they were saying thank you prayers to Mother Nature for the rain. My vegetables in my pots have grown a mile with all this good rain. My migrating bird friends, the grosbeaks and the indigo buntings, have moved on. I’m back to the regular visitors — cardinals, wood thrushes, downy wood peckers, chickadees, purple finches, wrens, and sparrows and titmice. I’m hoping the blue grosbeaks will pass through but I’ve never seen them in Roanoke, only in Alexander City.

I was thinking today on the way home that just being alive is a wonderful thing. To wake up each day with breath is a blessing. The world is full of all colors and all shapes of folks and we all walk around on this beautiful planet Earth, dressed right now in her spring fancy. Life is a journey and we all choose our own paths. Even if that road has some darkness and storms, we know that once tomorrow comes the clouds will part and the sun will rise.

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” — Agatha Christie