News Trend Smiling Faces|Actual

In June of 2017, my husband and I flew to Ohio, loaded up a U-Haul van full of

family treasures, and drove it 2500 miles back across the country.

These are our adventures along the way.

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The past few days have been spent sorting through the last remaining treasures of my mother- and father-in-law's comfortable Ohio home. Though this has been a work in progress for the past decade and a half, and we are winding down to the last few boxes and bins, we are still turning up the occasional hidden gem. My husband's younger sister struck gold three times in a row:

^ First she stumbled upon a handful of missing links in her big bro's proverbial school photo collection. Yep, that's my husband in third grade, sixth grade, tenth grade and senior year (from left to right). Though I'm looking forward to folding these into the incomplete K-12 series we have at home, I must say they make a fun little chronology all on their own.

^ If there is anything that can beat these shots of my husband climbing into his '71 Vega, it could only be that sassy red sweater vest he's sporting over his light blue button down.

^  These are slides. Have you  seen them before? Tucked inside the cardboard frames are tiny clear images that can be both projected onto a screen or reprinted as hard copy photos. My father-in-law generated hundreds of thousands of these pups in his lifetime, and while there are many that I have never seen before, these contain a special surprise. They are shots of me, taken in 1985 at a family picnic along the shores of Lake Erie. Unbeknownst to me, he loaded up his zoom lens and captured me wandering here and there around the water's edge. I can't to get them home to check them out in a bigger format, and see me through my father-in-law's eyes.

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Certainly, there is still plenty of grief and loss to be experienced as we sort through our lost parents' possessions. But their endless love for us feels very real as we find these little traces of our smiling faces

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Here are all of our adventures from this summer road trip across America:

Off Again

A Journey Through The Sky In Three Stages

Cute Cat Photos

Smiling Faces

An Afternoon In Iowa In Three Stages

A Letter To The Children At The Pool

Say Hello To The Byway

Three Landmarks And A Pass On The Oregon Trail

Road Trip Realities