Saturday
the 12th. Amy has spent the day with Sue in Colonial Heights. The boys
and I made a visit this morning, but Ben has a cold and has been irritable, so
we stayed in the rest of the day. Sue looked good today, but was still
very weak and short of breath. Then this afternoon her stomach started
bothering her and she started getting sick, so they are taking her to the
emergency room tonight. As of six pm they were still waiting for the ambulance.
Jackson is currently sleeping on a pile of stuffed animals under the dining room
table and Ben is watching an Elmo tape with me.
Tonight
after the boys went to sleep (Jackson never woke up after falling asleep on the
floor, I did move him to the recliner though), I used a tera server website to
research paddling opportunities in the area. Amy and all her siblings are
waiting in ER with Sue. They have scheduled a CAT scan for tonight.
Jimmy and I scouted Swift Creek,
which is just up the road from Sue's house, last fall. So I started with
that and panned out. I was amazed to see how little I knew about the area
after visiting it on at least a monthly basis for the past nine years. I
knew that there was a lot of water around, especially to the east, but
you don't really see much from the interstate and everything really looks the same to me in these tidal/swampy landscapes. What I didn't know is that
Sue's house is basically sitting on a peninsula between Swift Creek and the
Appomattox River. And not far downstream from their confluence, the
Appomattox flows into the James. This area is steeped in both
Revolutionary and Civil War history, and obviously much Algonquin history far
before that. Colonial Heights was named when French soldiers known as
Colonials retreated from Petersburg and setup artillery on the heights
overlooking both the city and the river during the Revolutionary war. So
hopefully the kayak will make the trek strapped on top of the van some later
this year. I think it will be interesting to kayak in waters that were
paddled so heavily by Europeans 400 years ago and by Native-Americans far before
that.
