September 2007 - Class of 1987
Over the Labor Day weekend I returned to my hometown to attend my 20-year high school class reunion. What fun! While living in Arkansas I rarely made it home, so have felt out of touch with my roots. I grew up in a small town (not as small as Kampsville!) in the bluffs of the upper Mississippi River. I remember my mother always telling me that I should appreciate where we lived because, “Not everyone grows up next to the Mississippi River.” I did appreciate it and repeated her words many mornings on my bus ride to school when we would come down the hill (I think it’s Roling Hill) into the river valley, and the fog would be rising off the river. As much as I hated the bus ride, the view was worth it. Even so, I am stunned every time I return home at how beautiful it is. But, on to my reunion….
What fun! I stayed with Mary, who I think holds the record for sticking with me the longest of anyone I know. I don’t think we were friends in grade school, but we became friends in jr. high. I’m not really sure how it happened, but I’m guessing there was a snide comment involved where we looked at each other, laughed and were friends since. We always have fun and I appreciate her immensely. I also was able to reconnect with old friends with whom I had lost touch. I think had there not been an official reunion, many of us would have eventually gotten together anyway, and I am very glad we did. I hope they are too and I hope we’ll stay in touch! It is a rare gift in this age to have the shared history of those school years together – from grade school to graduation – and it may be as rare to find that we still have things in common and we still like each other (at least as much as we did back then)!
I only got a few pics from the trip. I hope the rest of you folks out there will share! Here are some of m best girlfriends - all looking (and feeling) better than in high school. I'm in the mood now to dig out some old photos, so I'll see what I can find in the coming weeks (or months). Click here for a pic of me at the Mound rest stop in NE Missouri on my way home. The rest stop is build in the middle of a fairly large Indian mound group.
April 2007
Greg is usually pretty good at making me feel better when I'm crabby. This picture is us at the St. Louis Art Museum a few days after he was officially diagnosed with Hodgkins and the week before he started chemo. I was pretty worn out and crabby at this point and I had realized that the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum was coming to a close very soon and that with all that was going on we were probably going to miss seeing it. I won't say Greg forced me to go, but he 'convinced' me to go rather than stay at home and mope. It was a good show - I'm glad we went. I think I was more impressed with the jewelry and metal work than the Pre-Raph. paintings, but they were cool to see too. Aftwerwards we found our way to "The Hill" and had some authentic St. Louis Italian food before heading home.
This picture is a really good 'before' chemo picture of Greg.
September 2006
My brother, Lynn, was visiting for about week over the Labor
Day holiday and beyond. I managed to
take one single picture the entire time.
Here it is: Lynn and Greg on top
of Monk’s Mound at Cahokia Mounds. You
can just barely see the St. Louis Arch in between them. We had a fun visit, and although we didn’t do
a whole lot it felt like we were busy the entire time
August 2006
My dear friend Trudy visited this summer. We went to a hum-dinger of an auction in Pearl. It was the first and only sale Greg and I were able to go to this summer and it was a good one. It was hot and sunny that day - thus the parasol in the pic.
We only ended up buying a few things, including these great "Occupied Japan" fans. Here we're taking Trudy on the obligatory ferry ride across the Illinois.
While Trudy was here we visited the little river town of Grafton, Illinois. When Greg and I first moved to Kampsville in 1995 we were working on the archaeology for a FEMA project to relocate the town of Grafton after the Flood of 1993. The idea was to move people out of the floodplain and up to higher ground. Funny thing is (funny in kind of a sad way) that the relocation never 'took' and now there's a big boom in Grafton along the riverfront. I suspect most of the people affected by the 1993 flood are not profiting from this boom, but instead there are developers moving in and taking advantage of a beautiful area, ripe for the picking. My point? None really, I just wanted to point out that in the background of this pic of me and Greg is a big empty lot that used to be a neat old limestone school building. They tore it down this year and are building high priced condominiums there.
*MBV*
