Lauri Waterfield Fine Art

It was a different way to celebrate the Fourth of July: my brother & sister-in-law, her brother and I piled into a car for a trek to the top of Potts Mountain, north of Roanoke. It was just this time of year several years ago that we mingled my parents' ashes and spread them there…but instead of being a sad day, that had turned out to be incredibly special, as the rugged mountaintop was covered in brilliant wildflowers and loaded down with ripe berries of every type.

(Try to mentally delete the powerlines…)

This visit was a nice one also- aside from Karen's surprise slide down part of a shale-sided hillside- and the photos have inspired several new painting ideas. Oh- to live long enough to paint everything that's clamoring to be painted!!

Simple wildflowers at the roadside-

Wild Columbine

A mystery wildflower to look up-

And this fellow- an Indigo Bunting- sang the prettiest song  just for us (or so it seemed) as we wandered through the wildflowers, enjoying the black raspberries.

Some of the best adventures start with dirt roads.

We ended the evening with the most wonderful meal outdoors, entertained by all the booms of the town fireworks and the pops of local kids firecrackers- and a really impressive fireworks display at an apartment complex, just visible through the trees. But best of all was Karen's box of grocery store fireworks, set off one by one in the driveway. After every little rocket was lit and oohed over, we opened the very last package, a thin box with 5 sticks. We each took one and lit it, expecting sparks…..nothing but a thin wisp of smoke.

"What kind of sparklers are these?"

"What is this?? Oh! It's incense- it was all made in China, afterall."

"No…now wait a minute. That just can't be right….look at the box."

And I'll be darned- they weren't dud-sparklers or weird odorless incense at all- they were a "safety light" for lighting the fireworks! I think we all laughed till we cried- the joke had definitely been on every one of us!!