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Here I am at my grandparent's farm in Danville. I am playing with light here. I am learning a lot. Light has so much to do with your shots. I wish I would have gotten there 15 minutes earlier and my camera battery would not have died.

About the location: I am sitting on the roots of a tree that is over one hundred years old. My mom and her siblings, me and my cousins, and my own children have played on these roots and imagined all kinds of great things on these beautiful natural roots. We used to find pieces of old coke bottle glass, tractor parts, and arrow heads when we were kids. I can just imagine my grandfather getting frustrated with his broken tractor parts and just chunking them out in the ditch beside this tree. I know that probably gave my grandmother fits!

This is such a special place for me. We moved around a lot as kids and this was one of the places that I always could come back to and it never changed. I had a lot of life lessons here. Just a few feet away from where I am seated, there is a concrete patio that my grandparents got in the 1990s, my name is written in the concrete there! That is what home is all about. The small things that I can hold on to. I wonder what will happen to that farm when my grandparents are no longer there to occupy it? I would live there now if my hubby would let me. There is a house down the road that I could easily call home! Everyone needs a place like this. I wonder if I will want to go there after my grandparents are gone? They truly do make it home.

Memories: I used to come and stay with them in the summer for several weeks on end and I am flooded right now with memories that are making my heart swell.

What I remember...

~One time a cow got loose from the pasture and charged up to my grandparents door and we were standing in the yard, taking a summer dip in a big old stainless steele wash tub, and my grandmother appeared out of no where and scooped my brother and I up and dashed into the house. I actually have not thought about that in years.

~The smell of their house is so welcoming and I can still smell it right now as I think about it.

~Another time I remember is when all of us cousins were there in the summertime, a family get-together, and we were all running through the house one right after the other out of my grandmother's storm door. Smack! Right into the three smallest of us. I have scars today on my head and hands from where the glass shattered into a million pieces all over us. This actually happened more than once! One time my cousin Jason received some really bad cuts, he was so sweet and was the most cut up of us all, he and I were favorite cousins with each other, and he sang the song, "My Ding-a-ling" by Hank Williams the whole way to the hospital. Too funny what you remember.

~I also remember my grandmother giving us "sink baths" and that was the biggest of all the things she could do for us. Her hands would glide over our prickly, naked skin with such caring and kindness and would always reak of Dove soap. My own son, Tristan actually got a sink bath by mamaw when he was a baby. I think he was the last of us to be honored by that privilege.

I wonder if he will remember it?