When our oldest children were very young, our church was an often-outdoor meeting on top of a mountain and the children usually came home with quite a bit of dirt and scuffs. For that reason I dressed them in play clothes and we saved the fancier stuff for weddings. That’s how whatever little patent-leather Mary-Janes Pearl had in her closet came to be called Wedding Shoes. She was always very happy to have a reason to dress up in them.

In the last several years I have wanted to wear a special sort of shoe to weddings, specifically something with a bit of a heel when I have held the office of Mother of the Bride. In my daily life and for every other fancy event I normally require foot gear that keeps me closer to horizontal, and I’m not even very skilled at walking in the most moderately elevated pumps.

You are probably guessing that this is all an intro to the news that I am going to be Mother of the Bride again. Yes! Glory Hallelujah, Kate our youngest is getting married this summer, and the whole family will gather from East and West to celebrate.

Not just the shoes, but the dress, the jewelry, etc. etc. have been a major challenge for me this time around, which promises to be my last MOB event. Soon I’ll be moving on to Grandmother of the Bride, and I won’t feel the same kind of pressure. Grandmothers are allowed to be invisible or at least to go off and play with the children which is lots more fun.

Anyway, wedding attire and other related and unrelated business have kept my mind occupied elsewhere than here in my beloved Blogland. After weeks of shopping, one of my least favorite activities, I have my Wedding Shoes and everything else for my person and I have breathed a sigh of relief and sunk into a chair — but I jumped up again pretty fast to start in on the housework that had piled up, and the garden.

My cousin came from PA so in preparation I cleaned up the weeds and trimmed the dead flower heads and deadwood and swept the spiderwebs off the pool fence. I spent one whole week getting ready for her and my dear cousin-in-law and it was well worth it.

The other upcoming big event, for which I won’t need heels, is a trip to Greece and Turkey that Mr. Glad and I are taking after the wedding. We haven’t ever traveled abroad together, and neither of us knows any Greek — or at least, we didn’t know any until we started studying the Pimsleur Modern Greek (short) course. Now we are pretty good at saying “I don’t understand,” which we expect to use a lot, maybe exclusively if we don’t get on with listening to the remainder of the CD’s.

We’ll be spending most of our time on the island of Crete, so if any of my readers has any tips regarding that long and warm island, they would be most welcome.

The next couple of months will be busy with all these preparations for travel and celebrations, and they aren’t the kinds of things I usually cover in blog posts, but I wanted you to know what is going on in the background  that is actually the foreground. In my mind subjects will be playing Musical Chairs in a more chaotic fashion than usual, but I pray to keep them all gathered together serenely in my heart.