Growing up I would visit my grandparents in a very small town. Folks said if you blinked you would miss it. As we would drive through the woods and over gravel roads and rickety bridges, there was one way to know that I had made it to their house. The bump, bump, bump of the wheels of our car rolling over a cattle gap.

For those of you not familiar with cattlegaps they are metal grates of a sort that are put in place to keep cattle out of an area; in this case specifically their yard. There wasn’t much to do at grandma and grandpa’s house as the only child around so I spent a good bit of time laying in the porch swing listening to the squeaking noise it made with each push of my foot and playing on the cattlegap.

My sister’s memories of the cattlegap were not as fond as mine. She told me she thought trolls lived under it and was afraid to go near it. I think possibly our mother tried to scare her from getting too close to it but I loved playing on it and was never told to stay off of it. I suppose it was a “ being the baby” kind of thing.

Many days I can remember watching grandma milk the cow, feed the chickens and then sitting on the front porch snapping beans and shelling peas. But the simplest and most fond memories are those of playing make believe games by myself on that cattlegap.

As for the tumbleweed part well, I was a a late in life child and grandchild in the family. I most likely got away with more silliness than the older kids ever did at my age and was quite active I’m told. I would twirl around on the lawn until I fell town from dizziness and watch the clouds float by as I imagined they were all sorts of things. It was also the age before car seats were required for children and my mother often said they would turn around and my feet would be over my head. Because of his my grandpa would always refer to me as his little tumbleweed. Whenever I mentioned this to my husband he said that was the perfect name for me! For a tumbleweed is a bunch of weeds whose roots have lifted and formed a ball to be blown from here to there by the wind.

My desire to be blown by the winds of travel were instilled in me early in life, a gift left to me by an absent father yet carried out through a promise by those left behind. I look forward to sharing with you not only my travels but my thoughts on travel as well.