(ATHENS, OH) We were poring over Daly family memorabilia when cousin Julia served us water from recycled jugs. She bragged about the water quality and promised she would take us to the Appalachian spring where she – and some of her neighbors – harvest their fill at their leisure.

So Wednesday afternoon we made the short drive up the highway from Athens, past The Plains and Chauncey to Nelsonville and then out to the spring where other other folks were likewise filling jugs. Local citizens have inserted three, three-inch pipes into the hillside spring, built a basin, and created three drive-up slots, labeled “Cars” and “Pick-up trucks” as the only restrictions upon gathering this freely offered resource. The water is wonderful.

Coming as we had from West Texas, we had to be impressed by how green the countryside is – another thing we had let subside into the recesses of old memories from our two years in Ohio.

Before supper, we drove around Athens and shot pictures of the house we lived in 30 years ago, the schools attended by our four youngest children, and other sites in town. The university has added some new buildings and refurbished others. Many downtown buildings have been refurbished since a big fire a few years ago, and some of the houses have had new exterior siding installed. Otherwise, much is the same.

The memorabilia Julia Jane Nehls was turning over to us included a number of photos going back to her parents’ wedding in 1912, some newspaper clippings, a couple of family poems, and a little box that my great-grandmother Elizabeth Fovargue Daly had used to contain sewing notions. There are pictures from a 1984 family reunion in Newark. There’s also a book from Ed and Goldie’s 50th wedding anniversary, some World War I pictures, and a photo of the 1932 Ford coupe that my mother, Julia and Ruth rode in the rumble seat from Ohio to California to Illinois and back to Ohio.

The poems are delightful and reminiscent of the things Nancy’s sister Dianne writes.