A lot of driving!

Ellen has done a lot of driving in these past weeks. We logged almost 12,000 miles on our trip out west, and then just four days after we had arrived home from that, she drove us to Maine, and then just the day after coming home from Maine, she drove us to Swarthmore, which is where we are now. And then Tuesday, she'll drive us back home! We'll be seeing Paul and Max later today. They flew out for Paul's dad's 75th birthday. It's pretty warm and humid here.

To go back, Friday morning folks gathered one last time at Jim and Mary's, before we all headed our separate ways. Mary went to work. We said goodbye to Jim, Chris and Fran, who were going to another gallery. Then Chris and Fran were going to go to the antique auto auction before driving to Portland where they would have a day before flying back to Atlanta. KS&B hung out with us until after noon. Then we said our goodbyes. 

      Packing up to go ....

                                                             .... and don't forget Brendon's contraption! 

I got a last shot of the house and Mary's garden ....

... and we were on our way. Going through Rockland, we remembered we had a headlamp out, and we didn't want to get stopped after dark by a trooper, so we went to Eastern Tire, where we had had the oil changed earlier in the week, and in addition to getting the bulb, we ended up deciding to replace our badly worn tires as well, since we knew we would be driving to Swarthmore the next day. So we hung out in Rockland for another hour. We didn't get home until after 10p.m. 

Saturday morning we did a wash, reorganized, and were on our way by about 1pm. It was a beautiful, cool morning, and it was hard to leave the house. I read aloud articles from the recent Christian Century magazine as we drove along. One was about whether it was appropriate to use "trigger warnings" in a seminary classroom. I agreed with the author's view that future pastors do need to be self-aware of their emotional response to disturbing intellectual subjects, and I realized that emotional awareness was largely missing from my own seminary education. Emotional awareness as an aspect of teaching was not well-understood 60 years ago. Maybe we have learned some things about education in those 60 years!