Beyond the blogosphere

Has Linda been abducted by aliens?

No, but the past few days have been spent well outside the blogosphere for the most part. Husband Walter and I have been immersed in the entertaining, exhilarating, energizing and exhausting world of grandchildren!

Our Georgia Fab Four arrived Friday evening, April Fool’s Day, with their mom and dad, our oldest son. Mom and kids stayed behind with us through Wednesday morning while our son Walt left Sunday on the return trip to home and work.

At the end of each day Baboo and Nana were not the only ones exhausted. Mom and the little ones had expended much of their energy, too. There was a little bit of gardening, hikes on local nature trails and the Biloxi Bay high-rise bridge, coloring Easter eggs, an early Easter egg hunt, backyard campfire and s’mores, and good times with their two great-grandmothers.

 I will be inflicting grandkid pix on unsuspecting readers in the next few days. Not to worry, though. There won’t be that many photos. Capturing images of my grandchildren is always a challenge for me. First of all, I am usually totally engaged with them and forget to snap. Secondly, unlike flowers and rocks, grandchildren rarely stay in one place for very long.

Does anyone else in the grandparent category have trouble shooting*, uh, make that photographing, their grands?

*That "shooting" photo terminology reminded me of my last semester or maybe next to last semester before I graduated at the Mississippi University for Women (only it was Mississippi State College for Women back then). It was in the summer. My husband had started a photography business and required my assistance for a weekday wedding. I explained my dilemma to the professor of the Chaucer course I was taking.

She was a beautiful, elegant, white-haired individual and graciously gave me her permission to miss the class for a day, a major big deal since the course was crammed into about four or five weeks. When I returned, some of my classmates said she had announced to the class, with some perplexity and obvious anxiety, that Ms. Skupien was absent for the day because she had to help her husband "shoot a wedding."

They quickly assured her that we were not involved in mayhem. We were just photographing the happy event. Don’t think I was behind the camera, though. In the little north Mississippi town where we lived at the time, I never knew what my role would be. Sometimes it involved helping hubby arrange relatives for photos in a way that did not offer opportunity for any disgruntled in-laws to injure one another.

Other times I was an emergency seamstress. No qualifications needed as long as I had some emergency supplies and could thread a needle or handle a safety pin. Mostly, though, what I wound up doing was organizing a lot of dazed, nervous people . . . getting the right grandparents, parents and members of the wedding party into the right place at the right time to fulfill their part in transporting the bride and her intended into the state of matrimony.