Dear folks,

It's a beautiful time of year here in the Shenandoah Valley with warm, blue skies and cornfields that have, in the last two weeks, turned from green to gold to brown. The black walnuts are starting to fall and color is coming to the leaves. The season is turning.

We have been sticking close to home and have rested and relaxed the last couple of weeks with much lighter hearts than we were anticipating. The miracle of finding fluid instead of rind in Robin's chest cavity resulted in an almost non-invasive surgery and he is now nearly back to full force for the first time since he fell off that roof in June. Hallelujah and shout the news.

Our garden keeps on giving. We're letting a pretty good-sized watermelon, our only one this year, stay on the vine as long as possible hoping it will be ripen enough to eat before we leave this week.

We moved our "October Light" viewing station to a new location as trees have grown up and taken the original view from where we hung our swing 13 years ago. The new spot is perfect and we can see the panoramic Alleghenies away off at the top of the horizon along with a good view of our side yard. We have enjoyed the end of each day there and sit there with "the herd," our dog and two cats. They seem to enjoy it as much as we do.

We've spent some time reading and listening to music.  We were elated to hear Mollie O'Brien and Rich Moore's version of our song "Green Summertime" on their new CD, "Love Runner." We've enjoyed their CD immensely. Garrison Keillor's new book, "O What A Luxury," a collection of poems and verse is, to no surprise, a lot of fun to read. We leave it on our kitchen table and pick it up several times each day.

We'll be back on the road Thursday, beating a path to the Midwest. We got the first copies of our new "Back 40" CD to take with us and we've been getting some of these new old songs ready to perform. Having these songs in our pockets reminds us of younger days when we would spend most of each fall traveling through Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. It's a great time of year to see the country and we look forward to all the places our travels take us.

It's been a crazy summer and we're happy to be moving on and feeling good. We hope we'll see you somewhere along the way soon.

Your pals,

Robin and Linda

BOOKINGS: Trish Galfano, Myriad Artists, www.myriadartists.com - http://www.myriadartists.com, trish@myriadartists.com, 919.967.8655