Gathering

We traveled down to my grandfather's property this weekend. It was a dual purpose trip - to have lunch and meet with the family, but also to go see my grandmother's new gravestone.

She died in 2007 but the new gravestone was just put up last weekend. It's very cool and totally her (and grandpa).

I blurred out their last name...call me paranoid. :) And the flowers are over a week old ... but no one wanted to remove them. The fisherman and elk are totally representative of my grandparent's lives together. On their honeymoon they went hunting!

It's weird going to the cemetery...especially with so many people on a gorgeous sunny day. There were pretty horses in a field next door and we could hear gun fire from the gun range that was just a mile or two away.

People joked and laughed...it wasn't depressing at all. Our family is much better with laughter than with tears.

This is my great-grandmother's gravestone (and her husband, my great-grandpa, who I never knew)...

Isn't Audra a cool name? I wanted to name our kid that if we had a girl...maybe next time. She was a kooky lady. Grew up during the "Great" Depression and would laugh at people calling these times we live in any kind of difficult. This lady knew how to get by on nothing. And she saved everything. Plastic butter containers. Nylons with runs. Cleaning out her house after she died was an adventure.

And of course my dad is buried there too. Someone must have left flowers last week...I think it might have been my mom but she didn't say anything. Nor did I see her even look at his gravestone when we were there. I don't blame her. It's not easy.

He was only 36.


But at least he left a legacy (back view). (It's our birthdays that I blurred out...ya know...paranoid.)

Not sure why they called him "Skip" but that's how people knew him. I wish I liked the name Donald better...but it just doesn't sound right to me for my baby. And we already have a middle name picked out. And his middle name was Leroy...that just doesn't work for me either.

We didn't stay at the cemetery long...we had lunch to eat after all. Grandpa smoked a turkey and it was incredibly yummy.

Hubby and I brought Kodiak and Timber with us and had an adventure down at the river. Timber swam for the first time ever! We had a great time.