The Stage is Set!

Sunday, May 4, 2008, 5:30am
I have been awake since 4:15, too excited to go back to sleep. This week will be like no other for us, the culmination of years of dreaming, planning and enduring more than one sleepless night in anticipation of what this week will bring.

Today we leave Virginia Beach for a month at Ankida. During the next seven days we will partake of a plethora of great events.... We settle into our mountain home that has been under construction for over three years... we pick up a fresh, young puppy who will grow up under the brilliant guidance of The Great Dan, our Maremma guard dog that protects our flock of sheep, whom this week will start delivering multitudes of lambs! By the looks of a couple of them, I wonder if we will get a set of triplets or two! At the end of the week, a family reunion, a gathering of four generations who are converging on Ankida from all points of the country so they can partake in the much anticipated "planting of the vines". Babies (toddlers now!) Kaegan and Owen have their little fingers ready to spread wildly the crumbly soil and pat gently into the earth their own vines that will be marked with their names on a stake next to their vines. And we will find a way for Dennis' ninety-year old father, our dear Truman, to get his worn, weathered fingers into the soil. I must capture an image of those babies' and their great-grandpa's fingers in the soil together. Thirty-five hundred vines will be going in.. neatly arranged in perfectly punctuated rows running northeast to southwest.

We are ready. Let's go get that puppy, deliver those lambs and plant some vines!