Four years ago this week, we moved to Durham. The kids and I left Milford in the freezing rain to join Vince who had arrived the week before. When we arrived, we saw pansies planted all around Duke's campus. Oh joy! Today I am enjoying an Eastern Bluebird flit about the branches of the oak tree outside our living room window. The nuthatches move down an adjacent tree and fly to the pinecone bird feeder in search of left over peanut butter.

We're living on a quiet dead end street within the Eno River State Park. Yesterday we walked to the river with some friends and sat on the rocks within the shallow waters. Asa went wading, and ultimately swimming-not bad for December 2nd. Of course he's a Pisces and the cold water just made him smile more.

Asa is in kindergarten now, and Max is in third grade. They go to a year round school, so they have a shortened summer, but wonderful three week breaks the rest of the year. In January we traveled to Maui (where I interviewed a woman who retired from the U.S. Forest Service as a deputy regional forester for Region 5 [California]). We enjoyed 4th of July week at a family camp in the mountains of North Carolina. We journeyed to Walt Disney World for four days of theme park adventures the first week of October (sans crowds).

Max is on a jump rope team at school, and recentlyjoined a children's theater class. He moves through life in fantasy, emulating Harry Potter, Li Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, or Robin Hood. I enjoy watching him cross the yard kicking high and brandishing poles, sticks and wooden swords or a simple bow and arrow…all quite gracefully. He's also fairly well grounded, and loves school, the place we live, and the smell of the Pennsylvania countryside. Oh, and nature-he wants to be a nature scientist. (Where does he get that trait?)

Asa has a lot of Vince in him-he loves to tinker with legos and is constantly putting together ingredients for experiments. (He now knows vanilla is off limits!) Lately he's been making lots of paper airplanes, and digging through Vince's cache of potential robot parts. We enjoyed the Loenid meteor shower in our front yard, and at Thanksgiving, my father got out his old telescope so Asa could look at the moon. He's got visions of space, when he's not thinking about sharks, dinosaurs and robots.

I finished up my nearly lifelong project of restoring Grey Towers, and the site reopened in August. It was a fantastic experience-the soul has returned to the place. Now I'm focusing on creating additional web content for the Forest Service headquarters history site (which Vince designed), and cataloguing a backlog of books and manuscripts.

Let's see, did I leave any space for Vince? Of course he's an electronic kind of guy. Check out his web pages-you can learn all about his 1974 BMW motorcycle and his phone collection. www.digitallydo.com