We had an experience last night that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss…or ever have again! When we got back to the cabin it was warm outside and humid. About 10 o’clock it began to rain. Suddenly the lightning started and the thunder. For two hours we were not watching a thunder storm…we were in the middle of it. Part heat lighting and part streaks of lightning…it was centered over the lake. We turned off the lights and sat together and held on to each other and watched out the window…nature at its most awesome! The lightning was coming so fast that it was like watching an old time movie…flickering images, one after the other. The flag on the dock was standing straight out. The lightning would sometimes hit so close it would blind us for several seconds and the thunder would crash and the cabin would shake all over. Awesome beyond belief! This morning it was sparkling clear and calm.
We went into Portsmouth to do some photographing today. Found a little graveyard in the city center that had stones dating from about 1680’s. They had wonderful carvings on them…skulls, and warnings about sin!
The Strawberry Banke Museum is soooo interesting. It has homes from the 1600’s, 1700’s, 1800’s, and the 1900’s. It is a living history village. It shows all the changes of houses and social situations through the years. I just get such a kick out of these living history places. I can really get into them.
They also have a house and a little neighborhood store that is the period of World war II. Brought back things that I’d lived through as a child but had forgotten. Black out curtains and ration books. During the war they wanted you to grow a victory garden and to encourage you to do so…the simplest thing, like a can of peas, took 16 of your valuable coupons. Mixing color into the white oleomargine. The color came in a little packet that you would ‘pop’ and mix the color in with your fingers. The store was so real it could have been the little store that mom would send me to when I was a child in Coshocton…..right down to the threshold of the door…worn to a curve by thousands of feet and many years of wear. The little lady that was ‘knitting’ outside on a bench was simply the best *actor* of this type of living history that I’ve seen. She was just real…I ‘knew’ women like her when I was growing up.