Katherine McClure

We didn’t go to a church that had a choir, but our neighbor, Ms. Laura, lead the children’s choir at the Methodist church in the town where I grew up and she invited my sister and me to sing with them. All these special moments captured and preserved – the boys gleeful faces as they glided down the hill on their bikes, sitting on the Walk of Champions in front of Bryant-Denny Stadium reading the engraving on the sidewalk, making snow angels outside our old condo, picking strawberries at the farm. Don’t misunderstand – there were plenty of times in our lives where I picked the perfect outfits, stood the kids under the perfect cherry tree and took hundreds of pictures trying to capture the *one*. Maybe it’s time to step back, and savor those beautiful moments when they happen, instead of spending all our time trying to make the moments beautiful.

His recognition of the PTSD comes to a head in the Christmas episode, Noel, when he realizes that music is a trigger for his PTSD. Something happened when I was watching that episode, and I haven’t talked about it much outside my circle of breast cancer friends because I don’t quite know what to make of it. I don’t mind going in with clean wet hair, but sometimes you just want to sit in a chair, let someone else scrub your hair, then get the full cut, blow-dry and style. Two important things have happened for me in this blog post: one, I recognized that I have PTSD and two

Our plan for Sunday was to visit Smokehole Caverns and Blackwater Falls State Park. We had driven past Smokehole Caverns multiple times on our previous trip, but since I had to be back for radiation the afternoon of our last day, we didn’t have time to stop. If you don’t pack a lunch and don’t want to spend too much on food at the gift shop, there are some restaurants about 10 minutes away in Petersburg, or a few places with great views 15 minutes south of there near Seneca Rocks. We were looking at the park hiking trail maps (available online here), trying to decide what we had time to do when another family gave us a great tip about a waterfall next to the lodge.

So it probably came as a surprise to many of you that as Labor Day weekend rolled around we had only planned ONE weekend of OneSeasonOff. I started counting and realized that we only had eleven weekends (9 after you subtract the two camping trips) to do our whole list. The hope was that each week, once we felt comfortable with the weather forecast for the weekend, we could quickly decide the best place to visit THAT weekend. After tossing around potential trips to Norfolk, the Outer Banks, and NYC / Long Island (wasn’t on the original list but we’ve totally added to our places we want to go), we decided West Virginia would be our first weekend trip.