Going to France again, after 52 years

Enough about Monterey for a while.  Leaving Sept. 3, Dorcas and I will travel to France for ten days.  In a half century, this is a first for me.  Put another way--it was 52 years ago, almost to the day (it was August 15, 1966), that I flew from New York to Brussels.  The flight was on a Boeing 707, the biggest passenger jet at that time.  The airline was Sabena, Belgium's airline.  That flight was the launch of three years overseas with Mennonite Central Committee.

So, in fifty years it is a first.  In my life it is the second time I fly east over the Atlantic Ocean.  Here's what that day before looked like at Monterey, getting photos of the family and me on Sunday after church, before I left the next day, Monday the 15th.  House in background is neighbor's, since razed.  I stand beside my mother and father, bending my knees, I guess, to say I'm still their son, not taller than them.

more hot air

Yesterday evening a hot air balloon landed in the schoolhouse yard across the road.  Soon children from Monterey ran to the schoolyard.

scribbles from the past

It might not qualify as hieroglyphics, but for my money, finding this date scratched in concrete 60 years ago motivated me to photograph it.  January, 1955.  I was in 5th grade.  My father was 45 years old.  We were celebrating the dedication of a new "indoor" outhouse with a real window and double walls and a septic tank style disposal area.  I found this date when we tidied up the shop a week ago.  I had seen it over the years.  As most of his peers, my father exited school after the 8th grade.  So he never "majored" in anything. Yet I knew him as attentive to history and having a kind of reverence for dating things, especially concrete he poured around our house as property improvements.  So, with Father's Day coming up:  thanks, Dad (Lester Lehman, 1910-1981).

sweet potato harvest in the lot

The neighbors are harvesting their sweet potatoes in our lot, where in the 1950s my parents had a garden.  A team of horses pulled a shovel beneath the row and brought to light the several varieties.  Next they pulled them to the top of the mound to dry before packing them.