Summer Adventures, Take Two

Tomorrow I embark on Roadtrip Stage II of the summer. I think this will be the final one. My first had me in the car 19-ish hours, and a good time was had by all. It included the coastal route, which meant visiting the brother in Charleston. This one will include the mountain route, as I will venture to Black Mountain, NC to see my two-year old godson (oh yeah, and the rest of his family.) This adorable young man is Enzo. He and his family live in Austin, but are vacationing with the grandparents in NC, hence my opportunity to see them. I will spend the Fourth with them, and I have been informed that I will be TAKING PART in the Black Mountain 4th of July parade. I am intentionally not arriving until the morning of the 4th so that I will miss the Square Dance Friday night. Square dances are in a special circle of hell, I am pretty sure.

But before I get to North Carolina, I will be home in Greenville for approximately one hour before I get in the car with my mom for the two-hour drive to Edgefield, SC, where my Nana lives. We are going Thursday night so that we can get up Friday morning and go to the Strom Cousins breakfast, which takes place every first Friday of the month. The Strom Cousins consists of anywhere from six to a dozen women in their 70's and 80's (Nana being 84)who meet to socialize and talk about Lord knows what. I guess I'm about to find out. My mother informed me last night that I should probably wear a dress or some "capri's" and to wear some tasteful jewelry. Apparently my mother does not find all of my jewelry to be tasteful. You may wonder about the name of the group? If you are up on your politics, you'll recognize the name Strom, as in Strom Thurmond, former senator from SC who served a ridiculous number of years right up until his 100th birthday (how the electorate continued to send this ancient man back to Washington every year well into his nineties - that will always be a mystery to me.) But yeah, Strom is a family name - a last name that is in my family tree. My great grandma and Strom's mom were cousins. So my mom told me last night that I can actually attend the breakfast because I am an "official blood member," which sounds a little creepy to me. But I have to confess that I have always wanted to be a fly on the wall at one of these breakfasts, and now I'm actually going to be a card-carrying attendee of one. I approach with enthusiasm, and slight trepidation. I hope to write about it on the other side, though writing in dialect is difficult for me. (Some people would need a translator to understand my Nana and Mama's specific drawl, which I have been known to fall back into myself, but representing it accurately in writing is... challenging, to say the least.)

After the mountain trip, I will spend some time at the lake with my crazy friend from high school, Brandi, and then I will dash to Atlanta to hang with my good friend Lil, who lives in Denver but is visiting her mom, whom I love, in Atlanta. I will then dash back to Nashville for my Wed. Writer's Group. I hope.

And speaking of Writer's Group, how lucky am I to know creative people who are challenging me to write creatively. We did another common prompt today, and I ended up loving the couple of paragraphs I cranked out in that 30 minutes. It felt like maybe the beginning of a fun little short story. Or the beginning of a series of thirty-something books like my Trixie Beldens. Hmm. We shall see.