Stormy Sky

I'm still playing with writing on my photographs.  This view of a stormy sky taken from the Prinsendam recently seemed like an ideal one to write on.

And I do like the aesthetics of it. though maybe blue would have been a better choice of colors to use.

The stormy sky, however, reminds me of our trip to Huntsville yesterday.  Lane and I drove Will to Huntsville to the Space Camp, while Jon and Jane took Bert to Dolphin Island for a week.

Jon sent Lane a text as he was driving home:  "I don't know who was is worse shape when we left, me or Bert."

And it's true, those first homesick days away from home, often at a summer camp, are excrutiating for both parents and children.  I don't really know how children deal with the neurotic pain of homesickness.  It touches such a fundamental complex:   abandonment.  I, myself, remember it in vivid detail, even when I would go to visit Auntie and Uncle, where I was cuddled and pampered in one of the most secure cocoons in my memory.  Still, I missed "home."

The way I coped was by getting in Auntie's big feather bed at night -- night's are the worst -- under layers of heavy quilts and snuggling up to her warm fleshy body from which emanated the fragrancce of Lily of the Valley, her favorite.  Though it was most certainly from toilet water or talcum powder.  Couldn't have been perfume as I never saw any on her dresser.

But, back to the storm.  It rained so hard on us between Birmingham and Huntsville that I thought Lane was going to have to pull off the interstate.  Then, just as we came to an exit, it let up and the sun came out.  Homesickness is like that, so intense it seems unbearable -- and then -- poof!!, gone when our attention gets hooked by something else.

Good luck, Will and Bert.  And Lane and Jon.