The first weekend of summer was chock-full of fun. Henry and the girls left late afternoon on Friday to go camping with our old church in Virginia. They have an annual Dad and Kids Campout that they’ve gone to the past few years and thought it’d be fun to reconnect with friends again this year. I sent a camera in years past, but have yet to get one single picture, so I didn’t even try this year.
Instead, Ryan and I packed up the car and headed up to New York state to see my maternal grandparents. Grandpa will be 90 this August and Grandma will be 86 in the fall. My mom, Neil, and my sister Katie came up too.
The four generations. My mom, her parents, Ryan and I.
Ryan saying hi to his grandma.
My mom took us up to The Hill. It’s called that because you drive up a hill to get there and then the house (pictured below) where she grew up and where my grandfather was born sits going up a hill. On the other side of the hill is the spot where her grandparents house sat before it burned in a fire.
Another shot of the house…. and the barn where my mom and her sisters made many, many memories taking care of their horses, petting farm kittens, and playing in the hay loft.
This field (to the left of the house) is now grown over with trees, but it used to be open and filled with cows from the farmer next door. As a little girl, my mom would walk down the hill a few hundred yards to the farm to get milk. She remembers the hill being very big and the walk being very long. One time she was swinging the two milk bottles and accidentally smashed them together and shattered them. That was a sad day. Other times, she’d walk through the cow field and lick the salt licks as a treat.
My great-grandfather, Ivan, owned over 200 acres on this hill. He had a saw mill and lots of crops…. strawberries being one of them. My great-grandmother, Gladys, paid my mom and her sisters either a nickel or a dime a quart (I forget which) to pick strawberries that she’d sell at the market for 40 cents a quart. My mom remembers her grandmother being very picky about which berries got picked and getting chewed out a time or two for not picking ripe enough berries.
Grandpa inherited the land and still owns almost half of it. He hasn’t let go of the pond at the top of the hill where my mom and her sisters used to fish for sunnies. My mom got a hook caught in her foot one time and tells of walking to the closet neighbor for help….. the neighbors were closer than her house.
Grandpa told me they moved down to their house now when the girls were getting older and needed more room. He calls it the new house (don’t have a picture of course) because it was built after the house he grew up in. The “new” house was built in the late 1700s!! This is us in the “new” kitchen. Papa redid it for grandma when they moved in. They bought the house for $12,000. They parceled off some land around his childhood homestead and sold the house and barn to some people they knew in their church. The couple still lives there!
Ryan eating a pb and j.
We stayed for church on Sunday morning. Ryan went back and forth between my mom and me. Grandma and Papa’s little country church has faithfully prayed for Ryan since he was born… a full three and a half years. They were very excited to see him in the flesh.
Henry and the girls reported having a very fun weekend too, full of hiking, swimming, and playing with friends. Now on to our first week off school.
(c) 2016 Leighann Marquiss
Comments (5)
How fun to go see the grandparents and to hear the stories and see where your mom played as a child!
I loved that the small church who have prayed for Ryan all of his life got to “see him in the flesh”. I also pray for this sweet little miracle boy…and if I forget, my hubby prays for him!
Glad Henry and the girls had such fun together too.
God is so good!
(Your mom is so beautiful…and so are you!)
Love, Linda
What part of New York?
I loved this post!
Loved this post! So glad you all got to visit with Grandma and Papa…what great memories!! Thanks for sharing all the pictures.
It’s really good to see your grandparents healthy and living happily together! I’m pretty sure they are very happy to see you. Your simple way of catching up with them is enough to show how you really care about them. By the way, your grandparents seem very healthy in the pictures! They look pretty sprightly and strong!