Update from Woodberry Forest

I'm sitting inside at Stirling's Coffee House in Sewanee, sipping my coffee, watching the summer school students talking quietly at tables or working on their laptops.  It's nice to see people - real people - back in Stirling's, talking and laughing, mask-free.  Right, wrong, or indifferent, the world is slowly returning to normal, or for what passes as normal these days.  

J.P. has been at Woodberry Forest sports camp for a week and from what I can tell, it's going well.  His team, North Carolina, is 24 - 2, after one week of playing games in various sports against the other three teams of first time campers.  This week, as I understand it, his squad will begin to play games against teams made up of returning campers.  I suspect there will be a few more losses for J.P.'s team than they've had so far but there's nothing wrong with that.  

Photos are posted every day, along with the results of that day's games and team overall records.  It's been fun to scroll through each day's photos and find J.P., or his friend, Cecil, running and playing this sport or the other.  Competing.  

Joe seems to have adjusted well to J.P. being gone.  Jude and I laughed, at first, when he said one of the problems with J.P. being gone for three weeks is that he (Joe) would get blamed for more things.  I'm not sure where that idea came from but it was funny.  

Joe's summer basketball season ended with back to back doubleheaders on Wednesday and Thursday nights, last week.  He had a good summer season.  Although he struggled with his shot, his passed the ball extremely well.  Like J.P., Joe has the ability to see the entire court, or most of it, and to make the right basketball play, or pass, most of the time.  It's interesting, I think, the way both boys have always been able to "think the game" they're playing, whether it's baseball, basketball, or soccer.  

J.P. always has been able to see the right pass to make in basketball and soccer, when most boys couldn't.  Joe is exactly the same way.  It's fun to watch.

Time to finish my coffee and leave the Mountain and begin the drive back to reality.