Thanks to Amy for leading me to Jake who has the Sunday Post Challenge.  I have to think about where my favorite spot is, but I know it faces north.  I love to sit at the dining room table and write my blog, answer emails, and, or course, eat. I think I could sit here all day, but that wouldn’t be good for me.  When we first made an offer on this house, it was a HUD repo, and we couldn’t get inside, so we drove our pick-up out, pulled out the tailgate and began planning our dream home.

We now have a patio there, and we go out and enjoy coffee out there, or on the front porch facing north.

The reason for the northern direction is that there is a huge foothill at the end of our street, and you just can’t go any farther.  When I taught 4th grade, we brought our students on a bike trip out along this street and over the fence so that we could climb the foothill and see the Native American painted rocks in a little cave.  We loved to sit down and eat by the mortar holes where the native women ground acorns into flour.

Our neighbors called our foothill Marsha’s Foothill for a while because of the small incident I had up there.  My friend and I were hiking, and of course all the neighbor kids wanted to go with us.  So we started off.  The older kids, and my friend went on ahead leaving me to help the littlest member of our party, A 5-year-old little girl.  I had to lift her all the way because it was really too steep for her.  Big clue.  If they can’t climb it, don’t do the work for them!!! NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY BEG TO GO WITH YOU!!!  We got to the top and discovered that everyone had jumped across the gap between the boulders.  The gap looks like no big deal from where I drink my coffee in the morning, but up there the gap widens.  I knew I couldn’t lift, throw, or otherwise transport her over the gap, so we decided to go back down.  All of the sudden the ledges shrank, and I didn’t trust her stay put on a little ledge and move on by herself while I climbed onto the ledge myself.  There surely wasn’t room for both of our little feet at the same time.

So we sat up there and talked.  I asked her if her mother hadn’t minded that she climbed up to the top of the foothill.  Big clue #2  When in doubt ask the mom for permission to take kids with you ANYWHERE- even if the kids beg and beg, and your friend is an attorney.

“Oh, she doesn’t know,” she told me innocently.  “She thinks I’m in bed.  I have strep throat.”

So there I was at the top of the hill with a sick 5-year-old at about 4:30 p.m. on a December afternoon.  The rest of the group was on their way down, but struggling and not wanting to come back over the GAP to help us.  We sat and visited. AND PRAYED.

Soon my friend’s and my husbands ventured by wondering why our walk was taking so long.  Neither of them felt like tackling up the steep incline.  I didn’t think it was that bad going up.  They went and got the little girl’s father.  Fortunately for me, the parents were good-natured about the incident.  It was no big deal for me to hand the little girl down to her dad’s waiting arms, so we were down that hill in no time, and I’ve never gone back up it.  The dad renamed the hill, and we laughed about it later.I still love to look north to the foothills from my home.  Marsha’s Foothill IS my favorite spot, I just don’t want to occupy it.