PhyllistheAuthor

We've been getting ready for our third pilgrimage. We leave next week for Paris and we will walk over the Pyrenees (Mountains between France and Spain) starting on September 1, my birthday. We'll walk 30 days, ending our trek at Leon, Spain where we began our first pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in 2007.

Pilgrims have been wearing scallop shells to identify them as pilgrims for over 1200 years. The pilgrim shells my husband and I wear are five-million year-old Virginia fossils, named for Thomas Jefferson.

My son and daughter-in-law sent me pants for my birthday. The pants, shown above, are blue and white with tiny scallop shells embroidered on them.

Sometimes my riches amaze me.

On my recent trip to New Hampshire, I attended a concert held in a traditional New England bandstand. Many years ago it was common for small towns to have a bandstand, usually in the center of the town for summer concerts.

For more than 20 years, every week in the summer, my friend and former colleague Angela Robinson has arranged free public concerts in the small town of Henniker.

The concerts were so successful that the "town" decided that they needed a bandstand. Angela Robinson was not pleased with the proposed location of the bandstand and complained loudly to everyone in town. Then she found out that it was NOT the town building the bandstand. Her husband was building it in her honor.

So when I visited my friend I planned my visit so that I could attend one of "her" concerts. It was very special.

When I was a kid when someone was beaten badly at a game, we said he or she was "skunked."

Recently, we stopped for ice cream at an ice cream store near our neighborhood. And to my great surprise, i saw two skunks traipsing around the tables behind the store. They were quite tame and very beautiful and they obviously liked ice cream since they were foraging for bits of cone or dropped ice cream.

I couldn't help but feel that the poor critters had been "skunked" that is, in this case their habitat destroyed by a new housing development. They were beaten and doing their best to survive in spite of it.