Visitors

A few days after Easter, we enjoyed the company of an old friend whom I met in France over 20 years ago, Joe Mellon. He continues to work there as a pastor, with his primary focus on campus work at the University of Chambery. Here in the US for a few weeks in part to share about his work with churches there and to raise money for a Christian campus center, he made the time to come visit us. What a delight it was to renew the acquaintance! The kids peppered him with questions and we all thoroughly enjoyed the time together. Here he is at 7:00am enjoying breakfast with the whole gang.

On his way out, Joe discovered we had another visitor - a mommy opossum and her babies. We counted three! Trying our best to not scare her, we got a few pictures to share and so we could show the older kids, who'd already gone off to school.

We read up information about opossum, and found that they are marsupials, omnivores, nocturnal for the most part but it's not unusual to see them in the daytime, and they tend to be rather transient. She hung out in our yard for a couple days and all the kids got a chance to observe her from a respectful distance (mostly in the backyard, rather than in the front where we first found her). Two days after our first encounter, mid-afternoon, we found one of the babies dead by our front steps on the pavement. That was very sad. Still, we enjoyed a nice close up view before moving the creature to a more appropriate location.