HELP, I NEED SOMEBODY! HELP, SEND ME ANYBODY!

There is a five-year-old boy residing here!  You might wonder what the issue is.  Well, for one, I am used to living alone.  I am used to waking up every morning to the same routine and going to bed every night to the same routine.  I am used to walking out whenever I want and not having to tell anyone where I will be.


Due to some pretty dramatic and traumatic circumstances, my daughter and her five-year-old son have moved in for awhile.  A-W-H-I-L-E...because we all need them to have their own living space.  But until that is possible, we are cohabitating, which actually is not a bad deal at all.  She does the cooking and housecleaning, and even the mowing.  Well, as a matter of fact, yesterday, she washed my car. This is something I could get easily very used to.  

I work to make the money, which she will also be doing shortly, we hope.  Having their own living space is contingent on the money-making thing.  

And all just rolls right along, we do our thing.  But when I finally got the cobwebs out of my head this morning, I noticed, when glancing out back at my bird feeders, into my peaceful backyard, that there are two chairs stacked precariously on the knobby root system of the old box elder, a lantern and a couple of rather dried out peanut butter sandwiches are on the chair, and from eyeing it from the ground, I think that a small five-year-old wiry boy could probably reach the first branch of the box elder from the top chair and manage to use the rope tied around the lantern handle, to hoist that into the tree...

Thus, my opening statements:  Help, I need somebody!  

CHRIST OF THE OHIO

On this Labor Day, Don, his brother, Bob, and I set off for a cemetery adventure, looking for their descendants in a place called Troy, Indiana.  Somehow, after the cemetery walk, and it was great and there is a whole new picture blog of it ready to post as soon as I have time, I told them I was up to driving around there along the Ohio River as long as they wanted, but they had to feed me first.  So after a refreshing half-hour or so at a McDonald's in Tell City, Indiana, off we went again, this time to find a sculpture those two remembered from their childhoods, a huge statue that sat way up above the highway between those two little rural Indiana towns, that they had never seen up close.  

I doubted them, okay?  Surely, if there had been a huge sculpture up there, something that obviously was awe-inspiring to see, thirty miles from my house, I would have, after thirty or so years here, surely heard of it.  

Suddenly, though, they were like a couple of kids yelling, "I see it, I see it!!" and shouting directions to me about a possible road to it.  I did not see it from the road, of course, I was driving, and I was quite skeptical that these two guys were taking me anywhere but on a wild goose chase as we climbed higher and higher on a dirt road, but imagine my surprise when suddenly, I saw the statue, myself!  

They had never known what it was, had always assumed it was an angel sculpture, but to everyone's surprise, it was a gigantic sculpting of Christ and even had a name:  Christ On the Ohio.

We drove as far as we could, then hiked the rest of the way up a steep hill.  As we came up on the statue, we also came up on a gorgeous view of the Ohio River.  About half an hour and forty photos later, we hiked down, pretty much in awe, and I am going to share a few pictures with you here.

This is the Ohio River and what we saw as we topped the ridge.

Unexpected gem at the top of the ridge in Troy, IN.

The blue sky made the Christ sculpture even more fantastic.

Just an idea how massive this was.  We learned that a German immigrant who was an artist, was commissioned to build this on the property of a physician from Tell City, IN.  He completed it in 1956.

Let there be light, and there was light.