All the rest! – Page 7 – Skelton Sketches

Houseboating Together Again…

Posted on September 1, 2013April 29, 2017 by lindaskelton

Houseboat vacationing means a lot of family and wet towels in one place…

It also means gourmet meals shared in the making and the partaking.

It means a little swimming in the rain and a lot of hot-tubbing,

cuddles and cat naps.

It means a little hiking and a lot of stone throwing on the beach.

A first birthday,

a first fish,

and first some-mores on the beach.

It even means a little shopping on the water!

It means being together, all together for an end-of-summer’s vacation again after 10 years of growing up and multiplying, sandwiched between the first-born’s leaving home and the last-born’s flying away.

It means celebrating a slice of shared life before parting ways again, till next time…

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Sweet rememberings of our last houseboat vacation, when we were younger, and fewer in number…

–LS

And you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land He has given you…Deut.8:10

To Water or to Dig…

Posted on August 8, 2013April 30, 2017 by lindaskelton

I went strolling out for my morning garden tour with no particular mission in mind. But when I got to the potato patch I wondered… shall I water these sad looking plants–some yellowing, some clearly dead, others chipper and green and trying to thrive despite their want of regular watering–or shall I dig…

Bracing myself for disappointment I grabbed a hand rake and scritched at the surface of some of the withered lifeless vines…when what should appear but a lovely dusty potato!!! YIPEE!

I scritched and scratched some more, and more potatoes–whites ones and red ones, even one JUMBO one (there’s always one fellow that taps into the water just right and busts his buttons outgrowing the rest). And soon I was hunting down the pitchfork and digging deeper to turn up buried treasure.

Wonderful hot sweaty work it was in the morning sun. But I turned about a square yard of that bed and I have potatoes for many potato salads to come!

The moral of the story is, don’t judge a garden or a life by its surface. Fruit may not be visible but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Dig a little. Get to know what’s beneath the surface of that foliage, that face, that lifestyle….You may be in for a surprise!

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In other news this week…

We watched rampaging Redcoats (aka the RCMP Musical Ride)

motored across the lake for a swim…

beheld my Japanese Anemone in bloom (I love it! Thanks Nola!)

Walked the neighborhood admiring neighbor’s dahlias

and documented the wonder of being together…

for just a little longer…

while this bedazzlingly warm and dry summer fleets sweetly away…but not without notice!

–LS

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…” Eccl. 3:1

Hope springs…

Posted on February 21, 2013April 29, 2017 by lindaskelton

Hope springs, because of a promise:

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” Gen.8:22

And so the seasons cycle ‘round in a never ending succession. Winter cannot stay. Stark leafless branches raising their limbs skyward have only to wait for the sun to do its bidding…

It’s amazing what a little warmth will do!

Though I may seem at present to be obsessed with blooms of the botanical sort, there is another kind of bloom I’m watching, as my youngest prepares to leave the nest…

Amazing what a little love can do….

–LS

And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. Rom.5:2-5

But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Rom.8:25