Joining a church

We are about to join First Presbyterian Church of Lexington Kentucky.  It’s been a long time since we joined a church.  The second time we moved to Atlanta, in 1991, we knew where we belonged, Peachtree Presbyterian Church.

The first time in Atlanta however, things were not so obvious.  As newlyweds in 1984, we went to many of the Presbyterian churches out in the suburbs where we lived.  I was thinking that we should join the one closest to our apartment.

Sister Piel was singing with the church choir in Pensacola, FL and they were coming on tour to Atlanta.  One late spring Sunday, they were going to sing at Peachtree Presbyterian, so we decided we should visit.  We put on our Sunday bib and tucker and headed into town.  We knew where the church was - we’d been to the High Museum and seen the Presbyterian Church on Peachtree road.  We settled into the pew about 10:50 and were looking through the bulletin.  No trace of a visiting choir from Florida!  We went out to the payphone (1984 - no cell phones, no Google Maps) and called Muv and Pha.  Somehow, Pha was still home and told us we must have the wrong church.  Piel was singing at Peachtree Pres on Roswell Road.

We hurried up P’tree and took the left fork at Buckhead’s main intersection.  Into the church (parking was less of a problem in the mid 80’s than it became later) and settled in again.   Piel sang; we signed the friendship register, showing South Carolina as our church home.  That Wednesday night, senior Pastor W. Frank Harrington called the suburban apartment and Mary Anne talked to him.  They were both from God’s country.  Frank told us we needed to join his church.

Well, you didn’t say no to Frank, so we had our new church home.  We were in a Sunday School class for newlyweds, which included a rafting trip down the Chattahoochee.  We were there for 2 years, then to Gaithersburg, MD and then to Mt. Pleasant.  In 1991, we came back to PPC and made many lifelong friends in the Faithmates Sunday School class.  I was ordained as an elder at Peachtree.  We will always miss that church.

But now, we get to see what God has planned for us in Lexington.

Ski in Ski out

I had this story as part of the saga that we have been through over the last couple of years, but it really deserves a post of its own.  In February 2011, while MA had a hurting hip and we were staying in an apartment in Denver, Caroline and friend Katie 

















came out to visit and the four of us went to Breckenridge to ski.  Roommate Joe has a very nice ski in / ski out house there.

The drive up the mountain was hard on Mary Anne, with every curve and bump causing her shooting pain.  About an hour into our drive into the mountains, I realized that I had left all my ski equipment (carefully boxed and mailed to CO) in the apartment back in the city.  I don’t think Caroline had ever heard me exclaim quite so negatively and forcefully.

When we got to Joe’s, it was clear MA couldn’t handle the stairs that were required to use the bedrooms, so we camped out on an air mattress on the main level.  Caroline and Katie took snowboarding lessons and I skied with Joe and a friend of his.  

By the third day, after two days on the slopes, Caroline and Katie thought they were ready to “ski out”.  The path from the house to the lift is not very wide, and turns into the woods a couple of hundred yards down from the house.  The girls spent 30 minutes coping with the first 50 yards, and we all realized it would be foolhardy to turn and go between the trees.  Caroline, Katy, and I backed up until we found some stairs, and climbed up them.  That put us back at street level, only about 30 yards down from the house.  We walked up the front door, only to find that the house was locked.  There was no way I was going to ring the bell and get Mary Anne to hobble to the front door, so I turned around.  After retracing my steps down the now infinitely long seeming stairs, still in ski boots, I found myself looking uphill to the back entrance to Joe’s.  I wish I had pictures of that walk.  My legs would sink down to the hip with each step, which is apparently called "postholing".  I needed snow shoes.  Eventually I ended up doing a marine crawl to get to the back porch.  Up through the house, let the girls in, drive them to the lift, drive back up to the house, skis back on, and finally “Ski Out”.  I got my first real run by 11am.

During this weekend adventure, the land that I grew up on back in KY was about to go on auction.  Without as much deliberation as you might think, I worked with cousin Berkeley and we put some pre-bids on Millstream 1.0.  Herself will tell you now that she may have been clouded by the pain meds, but by the time we came down from the mountains, we were on the way to owning land in the Bluegrass.