Pies and Pictures

Before I left for my pilgrimage to Scotland, I did two things--well, more than two, but for the purpose of this post, I'm just talking about these two.

Pumpkins

The first thing.  I took two of my pumpkins to Gail's house when I drove up to Portland for the trip.  She had planned on a pumpkin carving day with two little girls she knows, but with one thing and another, it didn't work out this year.  So instead, my sister and her resident chef--husband Scott--used one of the pumpkins on a rainy, stormy yesterday afternoon...and did this:

Yep.  They made this most excellent pie.  I have never in all my days made a pie from the actual raw material.  I always use the pumpkin pie filling you buy at the store.  In fact, that's exactly what I'm going to do for Thanksgiving this year, even though I have five huge pumpkins sitting on the back steps right this minute.  Honestly, I can't be bothered, though I am totally envious that Gail/Scott did their pie from scratch.  No word yet on how it tasted...

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Pictures

The second thing.  Alan's nephew, Miles, emailed me a few months ago asking if I could look for some family photos that Alan might have.  He had several huge boxes of photos actually, and in the course of going through them, I found other documents and papers...in fact an entire history of Alan's family, astonishingly going back 138 years..!!  It was wonderful, and I felt like a museum curator as I carefully handled one of the oldest documents from 1876.  Good grief, huh..??  

I ended up mailing two boxes of stuff to Miles, and took the last bits with me in my suitcase on the trip.  It was truly great to hand these things over to someone who is not only interested in the family history, but will take care of it and pass it along to the next generation.

So.  During the several days' worth of sorting, sifting and separating photos and papers into piles of mine, family, friends and no one will care, I came across three photos of my husband as a small boy.  These were photos lost at the bottom of a tattered little box, mixed with other items in a bigger box, since probably the dawn of his life.  Alan thought there weren't any pictures of him as a child; I had seen many from his early teens forward, but nothing as a bairn or school boy.

I am going to frame the three because they are just so...I don't know...innocent and endearing and adorable.  This one is my absolute favorite.  He's about 7 or so here, and how totally heartbreakingly cute is he..??  Even the background fits--so Scottish--and then there's his kilt and his sweet face and his long gangly legs.  Sigh...












Alan and I were about 4-1/2 years apart.  When the photo above was taken of him, obviously in his school outfit, at the same time here's one of me at about 3 years old, in the wilds of Alaska.

Who could have imagined that these two wee kids would have found each other, halfway around the world and light years after these pictures were taken. 

Fate is a strange thing, isn't it..??