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I’ve known Aron for almost forty years– he’s one of my oldest friends. For the past few years his wife Deb has been struggling with a rare form of cancer, and after her long battle, she finally succumbed at the start of this month. Although I’m always sad when a friend passes away, it’s been rare to experience that with someone my age. It was a crushing blow, although not an unexpected one. Deb’s funeral was in Missouri a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn’t able to attend. There was a separate celebration of her life in Nebraska, and I figured out the logistics to make sure I could be there. I hitched a ride with Derek and Bech, who were driving out from St Louis, and we made our way to Omaha.

It turned out to be a really wonderful experience. It was great to hear from friends and family who had known her, interwoven with song and some hopeful messages. Aron spoke for a while about her, and he was thoughtful and eloquent. Afterward, there was a big informal dinner gathering and an opportunity to see some other old friends. Nancy, Aron’s mom, was there (naturally), and in high school she was like a second mom to our little group of friends.

I was also able to hang out with Amber, his younger sister, who I haven’t seen in more than three decades.

Derek, Bech, and I decided to stay in town a couple of extra days, and we had some time to hang out with Aron and play pickleball, chat with his kids, and (surprise!) play some board games at his amazing gaming table.

Although Aron was understandably sad about Deb, he and his boys had been preparing for this for a few years. We didn’t dwell on the sad things– instead, we enjoyed the good times.

We’ll miss you, Deb.

Our summer fun continues as our next group arrived: this time it was our kids, with their kids, and Mom and Dad (the great-grandparents). Quite a crowd! Little William is now eight months old, and he’s still as calm and smiley as always. He loves all the attention he gets.

One fun activity was Presentations, which we first did last Christmas. We agreed to do another round, thus officially establishing it as a family tradition. As before, there were a lot of inside jokes and open mockery of one another, but this time AI played a larger role, including amazing photos of (for example) Zack fighting a chimp.

It’s been a few years since Ollie last saw his great-grandparents, but he quickly warmed up to them. And William continued to love the attention.

The weather was perfect, and we had some outdoor dinners and spent hours talking and laughing.

At night, when everyone had worn down for the day, Zack, Alex, and I found ourselves still awake and looking for something to do. Since both houses were full of sleeping people, we ended up playing board games in the basement hallway…

One of the highlights was a boat rental for the lake. The week before, the weather had been cold and rainy with Tara’s group, but this time it was warm and sunny. Zack started off with some wakeboarding, and looked like a natural.

Ollie had been tubing behind our jet skis in past summers, but this was a very different experience: he was able to ride with Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, and Uncle Zack! He loved it.

Kaitlyn and Kyra took a turn…

… as did Alex and Zack:

It was also fun to just sit on the boat enjoying the summer sun.

Of course there were delicious meals (everyone took a turn planning and preparing), and plenty of games. The kids really liked playing Sheephead with their grandparents. I even dealt a hand with the best blind I’ve ever seen:

One of Ollie’s gifts from his “greats” was a little propeller-powered rocket that shot almost 200 feet high.

He launched it over and over, delighting in how high it went before popping out a parachute and floating back to the ground. Or, in one case, high into a nearby tree where Grandma had to climb up to retrieve it.

It was really special to see Mom and Dad with their great-grandkids, who just loved them.

Yep, it was a really great time to be together as a family. What an awesome group.

Tara is finally hitting her fifty-year milestone, and she and her family decided the best place to celebrate will be… here, of course! After Dave and Jeanele headed south, we did a quick cleaning of the party house and welcomed the clan. It was a crowd: five of her kids and all three of her grandkids came, along with her husband and a boyfriend (not her boyfriend).

The little kids loved foosball and insisted we play often. I guess Millie felt like safety was important, so she donned a helmet for our game.

The weather was hot and summery, good for being outside for dinners and activities and just chatting. For the big day, we’d rented a ski boat on Flathead Lake. And on that day, the weather turned cold (65 degrees) and rainy. Ugh. But we all agreed the nasty weather would make for some stories, and we’d already made the rental arrangements weeks before, so we headed out.

Emi and London were excited to jump on the tube:

And Ethan and Parker followed:

Despite the cold rain, we had a grand time. It even looked like we were enjoying being on the boat, although in truth we were huddled in towels to keep dry and warm.

No matter– with this group, anything is fun. We all donned party hats for the big “surprise” dinner…

There were plenty of games, including a new group favorite, Coyote:

The days whizzed by, and before we knew it, it was time for them to head home.

We hope to see all these yahoos again next summer…

During the visit from Tara and her family, we were sitting around at dinner in the courtyard and Ethan said, “This house is crazy… it feels like something out of the Clue board game.” After a moment, he added, “What if we made a Clue game in real life?” We all mused about how that might work, and you could tell the wheels were turning in his head. He took some pictures and did some work on his laptop for a while.

And then, he presented us with the cards for Clue in Real Life:

I suppose it helps that the names we’ve given to the rooms in our houses kind of sound like something from a game. Our character cards were hilarious.

They had that “old-timey” feel of the original Clue board game. We divided up the cards, just like in the game, and Ethan explained the rules.

Because we were moving between rooms throughout two houses, we agreed to use texting to tell everyone what was happening. “I’m moving to the Lounge”… “I think it was Lady Ivory in the Great Room with the Candlestick”… and so on. Since the game rules require that characters move to a room when they’re a suspect, there was a lot of hilarious running around.

Here Emi and I are reviewing our notes in the Kitchen while London peeks in from the Party Room. No cheating, London!

Eventually we all ended up in the Mud Room, because we’d all come to the conclusion that was where the crime occurred. Everyone was one or two clues away from a solution, but Tara beat us to it and successfully identified the killer.

It was a ton of fun, and definitely an original idea.

Over the years it seems like we’ve seen a lot of Dave and Jeanele. They’ve visited us in Montana many times, and we’ve visited them in Arizona… even during our mission! When they were serving a mission in Belize, we enjoyed going down to see them. We’re talking about future trips to Iceland or even Africa. This week, though, it was a little more low-key. They finished their mission two weeks ago and decided it would be a good time to go their family cabin in Wyoming and then continue north for a stay with us.

A few years ago, when they were here, they wanted to ride the Hiawatha Trail on the Montana-Idaho border. We drove out there but the weather was terrible: a cold drizzle with temperatures in the 40s. Not a good day to be biking! In the end we visited nearby Wallace and took a tour of the silver mine there, which proved to be a lot of fun. Well, this week the weather cooperated and we had an amazing day biking the trail.

Naturally we visited Glacier, and enjoyed a hike on the east side of the park.

We even saw a moose! This guy was a few hundred feet from us, munching on something in the lake.

As an aside, I sent this picture to my friend Breea, who three years ago offered a bounty to any of her kids who spotted a moose in Glacier. True to form, she promptly paid me a $3!

Pepper captured a classic shot of Dave and I taking a picture of a classic view.

Naturally there was plenty of time to sit around chatting and reminiscing. We played many games of Nerts and Skull King, amongst others, and since the cherry harvest is about to hit full swing, we gathered some of the good ones:

We always love hanging out with these two, and look forward to the next time we see them… maybe in Arizona, maybe in Iceland.

In our orchard we have almost a hundred cherry trees. Of course we care for them all the same: they’re all pruned in the spring, they’re sprayed throughout the growing season (don’t worry, it’s organic spray!), and they all get the same water and sunlight. Every year it’s interesting to see how much (or how little) fruit they produce, and at times there’s quite a bit of variation from tree to tree.

To wit: at the end of one row is a nice big healthy tree that’s shaped nicely and has a lot of leaves. By all accounts, it’s an impressive cherry tree.

And yet… there’s not a single cherry on it. Not one. I know it’s produced fruit in the past, and I have faith it’ll produce in the future. But this season, for whatever reason, it produced nothing at all.

Just down the row, maybe thirty feet away, is a pathetic tree that can’t really even be called a “tree” because it’s little more than a couple of spindly branches. It has a few leaves clinging to its twisted twigs.

But look at its fruit. There are more cherries than leaves! Despite its sad appearance, this gnarled monstrosity produced more than its beautiful, healthy neighbor.

I feel like there’s a parable or message here. Perhaps we see people who appear to be beautiful, successful, intelligent, and motivated. We expect them to say and do great things. We think their “fruit” will be plentiful and amazing. And then, for whatever reason, they do nothing.

Right beside them, there’s someone else who seems timid, defeated, incapable, or even pathetic. We don’t expect anything of them… how could they possibly amount to anything? But they grow, and flourish, and produce something stunning and magnificent.

Never, never judge someone on their appearance alone. They may have far more fruit to give than we expect.

As usual, we’ve had some spectacular sunsets of late, but tonight was particularly colorful.

Today’s a big day for America, and we celebrated by watching the annual Bigfork parade. There’s a fun small-town feel to it, where you generally know at least half a dozen people in the parade, and as you wander the streets you meet another dozen people you know in the crowd. Kyra and Pepper wore their cool cowboy hats (I’ll have to get one someday) and we were decked out in our red, white, and blue.

Afterward we went out on the lake and headed to what we call the Picnic Islands, which are a few tiny islands in Flathead Lake where we can beach our jet skis. We enjoyed a little picnic and watched the boats cruising up and down the lake.

As we were getting ready to load the jet skis onto our trailer at the dock, a man came up to me and asked if he could rent them for a little while. He was visiting from out of state as part of a family reunion, and several of his young nieces and nephews had never been on a jet ski. We agreed to let them take turns for a while, and they had a great time zooming around Yellow Bay. Our payment? Some slices of watermelon from their picnic dinner. It was fun to see their excitement and brighten their day.

We went home and ate burgers, potato salad, and deviled eggs: a proper Independence Day meal. Then we hopped online and played board games with Alex, who was home alone since the rest of his family had gone south for the week.

It was an all-around great time, and I’m always grateful for this amazing country. Happy Fourth!

Our cherries are coming along nicely.

Although it doesn’t look like we’re going to have nearly the bumper crop we did last year, we’ll doubtless have about 95 trees’ worth of cherries we can’t possibly use (we have 96 trees in all). As always, in a few weeks we’ll invite friends to come over and take some of these delicious lapins off our hands.

Every summer our friends Kim and Kelly rent a suite at the local baseball stadium (Glacier Field) and invite a bunch of friends to a Range Riders game. The Range Riders are in the Pioneer League, which isn’t quite the minor league for the Major League, but I guess players can still get called up to “The Show”. So the level of play is quite good.

Tonight was the night, and the three of us had a grand time hanging out in the suite and wandering the ballpark while the home team played a strong game and soundly defeated the visitors 9-4.

The ballpark is really nice, and the weather was just perfect for a game. There was even a firework show afterward. What a night.