Month: April 2020

Sunday, April 19, 2020

So it’s been eleven days since our last post. What have we done that might be interesting to you? We have been enjoying spring in Alabama. Spring and fall are great times to be home in Alabama. We have beautiful springs with the dogwoods, red buds, and all the flowers blooming. Maybe due to the wet winter, the trees have been such beautiful shades of green and the iris colors have been so vibrant. The blueberry bushes have already bloomed and now have lots of little blueberries. Of course this blooming all comes at a cost of yellow vehicles and daily antihistamines. But the beauty makes it all worthwhile. Unfortunately spring in Alabama also brings storms and tornadoes.

We always love Easter sunrise service but this year was very different. We set the clock to get up in time to stream Hinton Rural Life Center’s service (eastern time zone). Hinton is one of our NOMADS agencies that we love to support. Our church (central time zone) then streamed our sunrise service and we watched sunrise here on our mountain sitting in our truck next to our best friends in their Jeep. It was good but we sure missed the great fellowship and breakfast at church afterwards.

Easter Sunday also brought tornadoes. We had a total of 24 tornadoes in our state, most in north Alabama where we are sheltering in place. We had four tornadoes in our county. We lost power for 24 hours which is very unusual for us. We put Fred into the barn to protect from the predicted golf ball size hail (fortunately did not happen) but could still run Fred’s generator and power Aunt Helen’s refrigerator and freezer. We moved everything in our house refrigerator to Helen’s and we had the boxes and bags ready and were about to begin moving everything out of our freezer to Helen’s when the power was restored. It was a hard three days because we began on Saturday preparing for the predicted long track tornadoes, then watching the weather and going to the basement during the two that come near us, and then debris cleanup on Monday. Fortunately, we had no damage to any of the houses, the barn or Fred, so although very tired by Monday night, we also were counting our blessings.

This past week was more staying home and working on various projects around the house and Fred. We know that a lot of people are really struggling with the stay at home orders but we are blessed to be able to get out and walk and enjoy spring most days and we are slowly marking some things off our to do lists. Today is another storm day. Today it’s only rain and flash flooding in north Alabama for which we are very thankful. There have been severe storms to our south in the central part of the state and our hearts go our to those impacted. So far, no injuries reports.

Hope you are are surviving and thriving, with God’s help, while you shelter in place. We are praying for your health and safety. May God Bless and Keep you!

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

We know it has been a while since we posted but we really haven’t been doing anything exciting. We are okay. Really we are much better than okay. We are GREAT! As some of you know, Max has had a mass on the right side of his neck since January. Really it began about a year ago but went away, returned and he had a cat scan that showed nothing, it went way again and then returned in January and stayed. We scheduled an appointment with the specialist here while still in Florida and he was seen as soon as we returned home. After several trips to the doctor and different things being done, he had a needle aspiration and biopsy last Thursday. Finally today, he got a call from the doctor and ….

If you look back at our last post, we referred to Joshua 1:9. Yes, that was for us as well as our readers. We thank God for his love and care through this stressful time. Otherwise, we are still safely sheltering in place according to the state of Alabama’s stay at home order, and watching Spring spring.