Health Wealth and Beauty

I'm leaving in the wee small hours of morning day after tomorrow to fly to South Dakota. My heart races at the delight of returning to this childhood homeland.

"Health Wealth and Beauty." Where I grew up, Kadoka, was even flatter, and less green. In Kadoka there was a place where we played that was around a small muddy sometimes dry cow dam at the edge of a corn field abutting our back yard. We called it "The Trees". The town park also had about four trees, in a line. Old gnarled, gray, been there since pioneers, which come to think of it when I was a kid wasn't so far in the past. And there was another place, really wet, a swamp with an island and muskrats, off beyond the school, an anomaly in a place where trees were planted and nurtured as wind breaks along farmers fields, and where every Arbor day school let out for a tree planting ceremony. It is so amazingly different now. Families, mine included, planted trees in their yards, little whippets, and watered them faithfully. Now, fifty years later, its a different town. No longer transparent and windswept. Windy still, but the trees make such a difference! There are still places you can see through the town from one side to the other, but it used to be wherever you stood, now its maybe a particular intersection. [Pretty Quiet Around Here]

Why I'm going on about Kadoka I don't know. I'll be visiting my daughter in Rapid City. As a kid we drove the 100 miles to Rapid City to see a dentist or to buy shoes. Or to go up into the beautiful Black Hills, where my great uncle had a vacation cabin, and where eventually my family also built a cabin.

Here's a photo taken near our cabin.

Sylvan Lake is also close to the cabin.


And this, my main reason for visiting South Dakota this summer, is my daughter Wendy.

Here she is again, wearing a dress that she sewed for festival. Wendy's a seamstress.


And yet again, this time with her brother, my son, Rock, and his youngest, Mitchell Rock, in Kadoka. Rock will be visiting South Dakota this summer too. Celebrate! Cousins and grandkids, siblings, alla that!!!

I am so blessed.