Following Father

We often expect our children to follow us into strange places. Last Saturday, the family and I were out on on of our East Tennessee excursions, following the the narrow mountain roads around hill and dale to see-what-we could see. I guess it is my grown up version of traipsing through the woods that I remember so fondly doing as a boy. I loved to walk in the woods. But, I was never pretentious enough to call it a hike. It was always too unofficial for me and I assumed it required hiking boots and a pack piled high with provisions and paraphernalia. Only lately have I dared to call them hikes, or as Areli like to coin them, "death-hikes". Well, needless to say, no one has ever died on one. Maybe a bug-bite or scrape, but definitely no death.

In fact, they are life to me. They are the life I share with my children. I always see in the future. In this instance I am envisioning Mammaw Hailey laying in bed next to her grand children and telling them fanciful and captivating stories of how her wild and adventurous father led them through timber and train tracks in search of fairy houses and mysterious waterfalls. Wide-eyed the wee ones peer into the darkness of their imagined yester-year when Great-Papa Jon roamed the earth with a whittled walking stick in hand and camera at the ready; packing little Emma on his hip while fishing Abby out of the creek. Then wading with all three in tow, knee-deep into the babbling brook and dare I say it, into the tunnel with the dark slippery mud signed by raccoon and littered with cobble. Listen over-head as the train rumbles down the Clinchfield Rail Line. Great Grandma Areli could be heard laying on the horn as the noise from the train subsides and we ran splashing and slipping in the dark mud, out of the tunnel and up the spring planted weedy banks of the creek to the CRV. "Where have you been? You said five minutes" Great Grandma says. "Sorry, we found a magical water-fall and had to explore it", replies Great-Papa Jon.