I woke up this morning and couldn’t figure out why I was hearing what sounded like someone tapping on the floor outside my door. No one is usually up when I get up. I laid there for a moment listening until I realized I wasn’t still in the king-size bed with my cover-hogging, sheet-destroying, and diagonal-sleeping granddaughter in Panama City. I was in my own bed and the noises I was hearing were my girls outside the bedroom door. The great hunter goes to a men’s meeting on Friday mornings at 6:15 and most times I’m still asleep and he takes the girls out of the room with him. When my door is closed and I get up to open it, I know I only have about fifteen seconds to get back to the bed, get in and cover up. If I wait inevidentally, the girls will beat me to the bed and then I have to wrestle with them to have room to get in. And do you know how hard it is to get your covers out from under 175 pounds of dogs?

We drove straight through from Panama City yesterday. The car was packed and we were on the road by 7 a.m. Half the day I spent in the back seat. After we stopped for lunch, my daughter-in-law and I switched seats so she could sit in the back with her mom to help her Mom eat her lunch. So I was relegated to shotgun beside the Mario Andretti I raised. (For those of you not Baby Boomers, Mario Andretti was a famous Formula One race car driver.) Except for pee breaks and to grab some lunch, we didn’t stop. We pulled into my driveway at 8:15 pm. Thirteen hours on the road. If I’m judicious in how much I drink, I can go about two hours at a time without a potty break. Needless to say, it was timeby the time we hit St. Louis. But no one is stopping 25 miles from home. I texted the Great Hunter to tell him we were 20 miles out and to have the door unlocked when we got there. And sure enough, the door was unlocked and I only had to fight through the girls to get to the bathroom. Aah, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.