Southern Hospitality

I made a trip last weekend to spend time with my sister. She moved to the Greenville, South Carolina area years ago, after getting her nurses training. She was there a year or two when she met a Southern Gentleman, and they married. They were married for twenty some years when cancer struck. He fought the disease for at least five years, and he wouldn’t let us “mourn” him while he was alive. When we would try to pity him or try to coax him into eating, he would come back with a comment such as with his dry sense of humor, “oh no thank you, that might give me cancer.” You would really need to have known him to understand his humor. He is sadly missed by all of us. November will mark one year my brother-in-law has been gone.
More on a selfish note, I timed my trip to spend with my widowed sister with a letterboxing event that was to take place the same weekend. I have only been to Ohio LB events and really didn’t know what to expect. So with this in mind, I was a little anxious to say the least. There was No need to have worried. Arriving at the event site, with their Southern hospitality, we (RGang made the trip with me) were welcomed into the fold. We spend the day exchanging signature stamps, deciphering personals, and hunting for traditional letterboxes. Table Rock is a beautiful park, as is many of the other parks here, and worth a drive and hike through. That evening another event occurred called “night boxing”. Now, I was not too familiar with this “beast”, but decided to plunge in. That was an understatement! The night boxing event was all conducted in a creek. (Crick or creek-however you want to pronounce it) The hostess had implied that we would get a “little” wet. Holly lies! We were drowned! Okay, not really, but we walked waist high (until I fell in), so needless to say we were soaked.
After the night event, I returned to my sister’s house and she saw the mud and yuck and made me change outside and then go take a shower. I felt like a kid again! We had a good laugh and she said, “I’m going to have to check out this letterboxing thing”. I guess I’d do just about anything to put a smile on my widowed sister’s face.