The City of Anne and Warm Cantaloupe.....

We're back.

It's Sunday night and a humid 70 degrees, the calls of crickets and cicadas hop from water molecule to water molecule. We spent 3 hours on a 90 minute journey from Richmond, VA...lightning, thunder, and sporadic deluges made for bumper-to-bumper on I-95.

Urbanna, VA was a quaint delight. Urbanna ("the city of Anne") was settled by the English in the 1680 and named after Anne, the Queen of England, when she took the throne in 1704. Before that the Nimcock Indians lived there. Tried to imagine that as I jogged across the mist-touched Urbanna Creek bridge (biggest creek I've ever seen at about 800 ft. wide) at 6:30 in the morning with the sun hanging low on my left over the Chesapeake Bay like a huge, ripe persimmon.

Anne and the settlers and the Nimcocks are no more. Just the creek and the Chesapeake and the rising sun....350 years later. How does James say it? "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while then vanishes."

Well, for being a misty blip on the radar screen of the universe, I'm a grateful blip. Ruth and I were commenting in the car---somewhere between an antique store and a fresh vegetable stand---that we are most blessed with 4 great kids and spouses and 10 terrific grandchildren. Who deserves that kind of thing? Not us, but we're lovin' every minute.

Late morning we pulled over on a country road to check out a vegetable stand run by a couple of good ol' boy's missing a few teeth, but not missing any congeniality. They were delightful!...and good salesmen. We walked away with a bunch of fresh tomatoes, potatoes and string beans for $7....then on the way out they suggested that the cantaloupe (just-right ripe) might be a good buy....so we bought....4 for $2.

After we stopped a couple of more times...like for dinner? Those cantaloupe in the hot car were talkin' to us. Tomatoes and taters don't let you know where they are, but ripe cantaloupe are ever-present. At this writing, the vegetables are in the refrigerator, as are 3 of the cantaloupe.

But one is in the Foths. Didn't last 20 minutes after we got home.

Our two days away are bracketed by Queen Anne and a warm cantaloupe. There's gotta be a country song in there somewhere.