Guardian Angels

I should have known God was sending guardian angels my way today. As always, when we sing How Great Thou Art in church I can feel my dad's presence – and Grandma Hedberg's too!

I distinctly remember that song from her funeral – the first time I ever saw my dad cry. So I always, always, always without fail tear up when I hear or sing that hymn. Today was no exception. And we did need at least one of my angels later.

After doing a senior photo shoot, hubby and I and the neighbors headed to the Wisconsin River to kayak. When we made plans last night, we envisioned a hot, sunny, lazy paddle today. Well, we did have humidity. But it was cloudy and storms were forecast for late afternoon/early evening. We figured heading out at 1:30 p.m., we'd be good.

It didn't take long before we heard rumblings. We hoped maybe it was one of the nearby paper mills, but it sure sounded a lot like thunder. We checked the radar on our phones and the storms were a few hours away. So we kept paddling.

And no, these two are not the guardian angels. From a distance, they looked like eagles but, of course, they're not. We're thinking just your ordinary hawks. Because don't osprey have more white on them? This River Babe should know this stuff by now!

When we looked up and saw what we thought were two eagles flying and fighting a bit. It turned out to be an eagle showing a lesser bird (again, a hawk?) that he means business. Wow.

And this guy did not build this nest. He's a squatter. The nest has been around awhile and we've seen eagles by it. There really must be some territory wars going on. Like the calm before the storm.

Speaking of calm, I did manage to get a few lily pad shots before we realized the storm was moving in more quickly than projected.

As we turned the corner at the west end of Big Island, we saw jagged streaks of lightning in the distance (we hoped) going straight down from cloud to ground. That's when our weather guides said it was going to hit in less than half an hour. And there is no way, even paddling our butts off, that we could make it back to the boat landing in 30 minutes. More like an hour!

So we paddled toward the opposite shore where we thought there was a boat landing. We had hoped our friends' son could meet us there and get Mike at least to the truck at the other boat landing so he could come back and get us. Well their son wasn't answering his phone. But we were paddling alright.

Nothing says "paddle faster" like lightning bolts when you're on the river.

When we got across to the landing area, there wasn't a shore area to disembark. Just giant rocks. We are lucky none of us tipped getting out. As luck would have it – or as the powers that be would have it – there was a guardian angel on shore. A man had stopped to either watch the lightning or maybe he saw us. I don't know. But he gave Mike a ride down to his truck. It was lightning pretty good by the time Mike got back to us with his truck. And the clouds were darkening.

We got loaded up quickly and made it down the road about 3 minutes before the rain hit. And hit hard.

Whew.

We definitely needed those hours of rain, that's for sure. Just so grateful we had angels making sure we could safely watch the storm from our living rooms.

How great Thou art, indeed!