The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

(This Photo was found here via Google Images)

Not every week...but most weeks...I find myself going out and having to buy something new to replace something old and hopelessly lost.  As most of you know who come by here to read, 11 months ago we moved from Portland, Oregon, to southeastern Michigan.  In the process...and it was such a whirlwind process, considering how quickly it happened from the time we heard of the possibility of moving to the actual reality of it...I lost, misplaced, mis-packed, or tossed a lot of stuff.  Most of it's mundane and not very expensive and obviously not very important for the most part.  Like clothes hangers.  I'd had hundreds of clothes hangers and donated many of them, thinking I had more than enough to service our needs here.  Think again.  Yesterday I bought my second pack of them since arriving here.  And a steam iron.  I have no clue what happened to my old steam iron.  And I still can't find my beautiful Pendleton collectors coffee mugs my daughter gifted me with thru the years she worked for that company in Portland.  But I'm not going to buy more coffee mugs before I find those.  Dear Hubby and I have 4 or 5 cups and that's plenty for us.  The big mystery regarding that is I do have one of those mugs and I use it all the time.  But why or how it arrived here and is on my shelf while all of its mates are still MIA...well, I have no answer for that.  At least I finally found our wedding rings and a couple other pieces of heirloom jewelry so I know there's hope for the coffee mugs because I do remember packing them.  It's when I open the storage cupboards downstairs and gaze upon the many unpacked bins stashed away in them that I have a tendency to shudder and close them back up again.  I'd done enough sorting and packing and moving 11 months ago to last me for the rest of my lifetime.  One of these days I'll tackle the bins.  Just not any time soon.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. ~ Sigmund Freud

Don't you hate it when you do something incredibly stupid?  Well, I just did.

We bought a new-to-us Dodge Caravan a few weeks ago.  A 2009 model with only 27,000 miles on it.  Whoever had it took very good care of it.  The interior was spotless.  It drives like a dream.

Then along comes me.

My main vehicle of transportation has been a little red 1993 Nissan pick up that we've had since the mid-90s.  I like pick ups and this one was a great fit for me.  I used it for commuting back and forth to work.  I taught both of my children how to drive with it.  I used it for hauling away trash and junk and transporting big items we bought.  It was an automatic and had great visibility.  Best of all, it'd been paid off for years.  When we bought the Dodge Caravan we gifted it to our son and daughter-in-law who'd had their pick up stolen soon after we moved to Michigan.

Today I needed to grocery shop.  So as I was sitting in the car letting it warm up a bit I took the garage door opener that I'd brought outside and stuck it up inside a little nook I'd found behind the drop-down rear view mirror.  My brain tells me, "Hey, that's a great spot to store that!  Any crook looking inside won't see it!"  So I go ahead and stow the opener up there.  When I get home I try to open the little compartment.  The garage door opener is stuck inside there and I can't get it out.

What a bone head.

I did everything I could to try to open it without breaking the little latch door.  And now the latch door won't close all the way either.  Unless Dear Hubby can figure it out when he gets home I guess I'll have to take it back to the dealership.  I wonder if something as stupid as that is covered by Warranty?

I am not looking forward to telling Dear Hubby about this.

And I'm hoping and praying he has the other garage opener in his truck or we're in a world of hurts.

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say "thank you?" ~ William A. Ward

I have no specific reason for the photo on here this evening.  It doesn't illustrate what I'm going to write about because, to be totally honest with you, I'm so sleepy tonite as I sit here I have no idea what I'm going to write about.  It was taken from the back deck of my son's house just before dawn on a very frigid morning last week.  I am continually amazed at the quality of the pictures my little Android phone's camera takes.  It captured the various shades of blue in the sky and on the snow just as they looked in the viewfinder.  And it looks every bit as peaceful and serene as it was out there that morning.  We've been here in Michigan for almost 11 months and I have taken photos from their back deck thru every season now.  Each has had its own exquisite beauty, from the bare limbs of winter silhouetted against a crystal cold sky to the gold and russet leaves in the canopy of autumn.  How people can look at scenes like this and not appreciate God's hand in its creation mystifies me.

I didn't look at the date of my last post.  Sometimes I hate to, when I know it's been a while since I've written.  I can only say the busyness of daily life has been overwhelming me and not leaving me with much time at the end of the day before it's time to collapse into sleep so deep I marvel I even awaken in the morning.  But it's a good busyness, being with the grandboys.  I realized the other day it's been at least a couple of months now since Cooper, the younger one, has thrown a major temper tantrum.  Hopefully I'm not jinxing myself by mentioning that here because when he decides to throw one, he throws a whopper.  But the last few times he has I've found something so simple in dealing with them I kick myself and wonder why I didn't think of this a year or so ago.  I pick him up, take him into the extra bedroom, gently lay him on the carpet, and tell him quietly, "You can come out when you can be a good boy."  Then, amidst the screaming, the tears, and flailing arms and legs, I turn, leave the room, and pull the door shut behind me.  That usually triggers off even more squawking and screeching...but Dylan and I go about our business in the living room totally ignoring him.  I can hear the temper slowly fade away.  And sometimes I can hear him rummaging around in the toy box talking to himself before he decides to crack open the door an inch and calls out, "Gram, I can be a big boy now!"  So we welcome him back into our little circle, all of us acting like nothing has happened, and he's good as gold.  Go figure.

Every now and then I scroll down my blog page here and look at the cities around the world where visitors who read my blog come from.  Sometimes, just by the name of a town or city, I'll know it's a friend who's come to read.  Most often, tho, the cities and towns from around America and the world are towns and cities I've never heard of.  Tonite I spotted Oakville, Ontario, Canada.  Before I moved to the Midwest I'd never heard of it before.  But I know now it's not too far from Kitchener where I've visited several times.  I see a city from The Netherlands who visits regularly tho I have no idea who that might be because they've never commented on here to my knowledge.  And while a dear friend was visiting her homeland of Norway last year, I saw the city of Stavanger several times and thought it was her.  But she said no, she never got a chance to read while she was traveling.  I thought that was a pretty funny coincidence!  My little map is dotted with red spots all over the world...over 17,000 just in the last year.  I can't imagine why they all stop here but I'm so glad they do.  Not the mega-numbers of blogs like "Pioneer Woman" but enough to make me feel like "You like me!  You really like me!"  Ha...poor Sally Field will never live that down, but I know how she feels.  It's the readers who validate who we writers are, especially the ones who come back over and over again.  You know they wouldn't take the time, not with the millions of blogs out there, if they didn't like what they were reading.  I read somewhere a few years ago in the height of the blog-writing frenzy that a new blog was created every second of the day.  If you had one visitor you were lucky.  So I consider myself lucky.

I don't know if there's such a thing as Blog Reader Appreciation Day...there seems to be one for everything else in life.  I think I'll take it upon myself to make it so, at least here on my blog today.  Many of you have been with me from the beginning when I first stumbled and bumbled my way into the blogosphere almost 7 years ago.  Some of you are newly arrived.  All of you are special to me...you didn't have to stay here and read once you landed on my page but I'm so glad you did.   I've only used a small portion of my allotted 86,400 seconds to say it, but "thank you".  Sincerely.  From the bottom of my heart.

No one ever really dies as long as they took the time to leave us with fond memories. ~ Chris Sorensen

There is nothing like the death of a close friend or loved one as far as making us realize our own vulnerability and how little control we truly have over our own lives.  We received news this morning that a very dear friend of Dear Hubby's passed away yesterday due to ongoing complications he'd suffered since having back surgery a few weeks ago.  In the process he'd suffered a stroke, which is something Dear Hubby is morbidly afraid of in regards to his own family history.  Also, this friend and Dear Hubby are almost the same age.  When I got on Facebook and notes from friends verified the seriousness of a message Dear Hubby woke up to find on his phone this morning:... "I've got really bad news!" from a mutual friend...Dear Hubby went off in another room and cried like his heart was breaking.   This friend had called Dear Hubby just a day or two before he'd gone in to have the back surgery, asking for prayer.  The last time Dear Hubby saw him was last summer when he'd flown into Portland and G had come out to pick him up at the airport. 

He'd asked me to send G a Get Well card right after the surgery.  Usually I am very good about doing things like that.  And even tho it isn't an excuse, in the busyness of the holidays and everyday life here, I had forgotten to do so.  This morning Dear Hubby said to me, "I hope in the future, when I ask you to do something like that for me,  next time you don't forget."  He didn't mean it the way I took it but I was a bit offended by that statement.  I try to do the best I can with the limited free time I have...and why can't men just DO something like that for themselves?  But the heat of the moment passed and I know he was feeling badly because the card never did get sent to G.  I felt badly, too.  Dear Hubby made a very valid point, tho.  He said we all need to act upon feelings when we feel them.  That's very true.  Little did we know G wouldn't make it.   In one of the Wyatt Earp movies, where Val Kilmer played Doc Holliday, as he lay dying of consumption he made a remark about not having many friends in his lifetime but Wyatt Earp had truly been one of his.  That line has stuck with both Dear Hubby and I ever since we heard it.  I know I wrote a blog entry recently about people who are well loved and then die feeling like they have no friends.  I think that is the biggest vulnerability in all our lives, never knowing how many really do love and care for us.  If only we'd take the time more often to tell not only family but dear friends just how much they mean to us. 

Myself included.

They say that the eye is the window to the soul. But it is the soul that is the window. ~ Andrew Hamilton

I had kind of a strange thought the other day as I sat watching my oldest grandson playing a wrestling video game.  Video animation has improved to the point where, if you come in unawares to a room where someone is playing a game, you aren't sure if what you're seeing is real or created.  The body movements are so fluid, so human-like.  That is, until the face turns towards the screen and you look into the eyes.  No matter how talented the animators of today are there is one thing they can't create:  a soul.  The eyes are flat and lifeless.  I have been with people who've died.  When the soul is gone from the body, the eyes are empty.  Sightless.  Immediately.

As my mother died, she shed one last tear.  The hospice nurse told my sister-in-law and me that many people do that.  Regrets?  Pain at leaving?  I don't know.  But once the soul is gone, it's gone.

People argue all the time about what a soul is.  What it isn't.  Where it goes.  Where it doesn't go.  That souls create auras around people.  That photographs show them leaving the body. 

I will tell you what my soul is.

It is the thoughts in my mind that are never quiet.  The voice of me.  The essence of my conscience.  The inner me who gazes out at the outside me.  I know it is contained inside of me and yet it isn't anything finite that I can hold up and show you.  It is the image looking back at me in the mirror.  The part of me that feels joy and sorrow, peace and anxiety, love and pain.  Who communicates with the outside world thru words and touch and gestures.  It feels the wind and holds its face up to the warmth of the sun.  It heard the voice of God and recognized it when it did.  And it yearned for something more...all my life...some way to fill the empty void it felt until it found the peace that passes all understanding.

And people will argue with me, when I tell them my soul was touched by God.  And that's ok.

I know what I know.

At what fork in the road,

what moment in time,

do we lose the magic of childhood?

When do we realize

we no longer know how

to play?

That people aren't always kind?

That the universe can spin out of our control

and leave us shattered

and 

disillusioned?

When our rose colored glasses

fall away for the last time

and rainbows

don't end

in pots of gold?

When does Creation

become commonplace

and we no longer take the time

to see its wonders

with the eyes of a child?

Where does the essence of who 

we truly are

disappear to?

And why does it have to go?

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood. ~ Sam Ewing

Neighborhood friends.

This is not a photo of me with mine, but it could be.  The time period is right.  The clothes and haircuts are right.  I found it when I Googled "neighborhood friends" and I loved it.  Hopefully I'm not abusing any copyright laws by using it.

In the years when I was around the ages these kids appear to be, neighborhoods in small towns across America were loaded with children.  Our neighborhood was no exception.  In my family I had three brothers.  One family had 10 kids.  Another family had 6 boys.  A few other families had two or three kids. Summer twilight games outside were amazing fun with so many playing Hide 'n' Go Seek or sandlot baseball or games we dreamed up on the spot.

My family moved away from my hometown in 1966.  We moved to the Portland, Oregon, area which was around 150 miles away.  On occasion we'd take a drive back for a day so my mom could visit one of my grandfathers in Hoquiam.  Most of the time we kids didn't want to visit him...we wanted to be dropped off with friends in our hometown.  I can not tell you how devastated I was by that move.  I can not tell you how much I missed my childhood friends.  And thru the years I lost contact with most of them.

Then along came the internet.  People searches.  Alumni sites.  All kinds of ways to find and reconnect with people.  And I've found a few of my childhood friends.  Or they have found me.  Even tho 46 years have passed since I lived there and many moved away in adulthood there is still some kind of bond there between us.  Shared memories, shared histories.  It is an amazing thing to sit down face-to-face with one and pour over what would've been my high school Senior yearbook if I'd still been there.  To find out who's died or found success and those who never moved away.  We could remember most of those kids all the way back to first grade. Most amazing of all was to actually be sitting across a restaurant table, spending time with one of those childhood friends whom I hadn't seen in 45 years.  We reconnected just before my family moved to Michigan.  I feel so blessed to have seen her one more time.

And now, here I am at 58.  2400 miles from home.  In a city where no one shares any history with me at all.  I have become friendly with many since moving here but at this age, at this stage, I don't know if I'll ever be able to form that intimacy that comes with really knowing someone.  How does one find the time, in the busyness of life?  But the lovely thing about friendship is it comes on many levels...from the acceptance and welcoming we've received from a small community church we've been attending to have some face-to-face fellowship with other Christians...from our neighbor Donna who is one of the loveliest people I've ever met...from all the people who cross my path in a day.  Friendship itself isn't what's most important, I've found...it's friendliness.  A smile, a shared greeting, a wave across the street.  Just knowing you're acknowledged, a part of the community...it makes all the difference in the world.

I have been thinking some lately about the things I will probably never see again in my lifetime.  When you move as far away as I have, you don't go 'home' every day.  But you know, it's not the physical part of being there that you take with you anyway.  It's the memories.  It's what you tuck away in your heart for safe keeping. 

It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us. ~ Igor Stravinsky

"The blog has to fit around life, not the other way round".

I think it's been a few years since I stumbled across this absolutely beautiful blog by a lovely Irish woman named Ciara.  I noticed she hadn't posted in a long time but as I scanned down my sidebar to the blogs I enjoy checking out I noticed she'd finally updated hers.  How disappointed I was to read that she's contemplating shutting hers down, and I left her a comment telling her I hope she sticks it out.  She is such a wonderful writer and the way she incorporates her ethereal, gorgeous photography into each post has been such a delight.  I will miss her terribly if she does decide to leave her blog behind.

As I read each comment from her readers, the above quote really stuck with me, written to her by another blogger.  I've been writing my blog a long time as far as personal blogs go...it will be 7 years in April, and in the earlier years I wrote on an almost daily basis.  But Life never treads water.  I was a middle school lunch lady when I first began writing.  Then a secretary in a small gutter hanging company.  A freelance data entry person.  Then, in March of 2006, I began doing full time day care for my first grandson when he was a month old.  Two years later his little brother arrived and became a part of my daily routine, too.  My blog has morphed here, there, and everywhere since then.  The lack of quiet time to write, the busyness of my days, the weariness from  working 11 1/2 hours many days...they took a big toll on my blogging time.  I became very frustrated and even thought about closing down my blog as well but then I remembered why I'd begun blogging in the first place --  to keep a living legacy for my grandsons.  In the grand scheme of things, in the future when I'm no longer here and they have this record of my life and their involvement in it, I don't think it's going to matter to them how often or how 'wordy' I was as I wrote during these years.  What's going to matter is that I did write, that I chronicled their childhoods here and my part in them, the joy they brought to me, the deep love and special bond we've shared.  Hopefully things they read will trigger off long-forgotten memories.  Hopefully they'll read what I've written and remember me with the same fondness and love for me that I've felt for them.

So...when times come that are especially busy...when my thoughts and focus are scattered and I have a hard time reeling them in to write anything halfway coherent...when I get discouraged about how haphazardly I find time to write, when I get frustrated and think about tossing in the towel I remember that my blog isn't just for me.  My blog is for my family.  My blog is something I hope will keep the bond going between the generations from me on down the line.  If the world lasts that long, I hope some day my great-great-great grandchild will read these words and will think,  "Boy, that crazy old lady was really something, wasn't she?"  And even tho I'll be long gone and they'll never have the opportunity to meet me face to face, they'll know me thru my words.

Don't cry when the sun is gone, because the tears won't let you see the stars. ~ Violeta Parra

You see darkness

where I see Light.

You resist change

and I embrace it.

You see despair

where I see hope.

You cope

and I thrive.

You feel emptiness

where I am filled to overflowing.

You lack faith

and I believe.

You tell me my life is a pipe dream.

I tell you I have found joy.

You tell me you pity me

and I tell you 

you don't know what you are missing.

 Your eyes are filled with deep sadness

but mine shine with an inner

peace

I would share with you

But you are steeped in misery.

As I passed by 

You shut the door 

and wouldn't let 

me in.

.

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. ~ From the television show The Wonder Years

This is the house we left behind in Portland.

We celebrated 28 Christmases there.

I wonder if it's missing us 

today.

Man loves company even if it is only that of a small burning candle. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I was looking at some photos on a friend's Facebook page yesterday.  One that caught my attention was of seven women taken back in the early 1990s...a group of women who've been friends for several decades now.  At that particular time they were especially close...most of their children were good friends as well and they spent a lot of time together.  But what really hit me about the photo was what was written about one of them who passed away this year.  I had always thought she had the world by the tail and lived a happy life.  But someone had written a comment saying, "She was well loved and she didn't know it."

How many of us go thru Life and feel like no one loves us?

Funny how sometimes, even when we're surrounded by others, we can feel so isolated and alone. Is it because we're so afraid of rejection that we're hesitant to reach out? I know for myself that that's what holds me back at times. Or it did when I was younger. As I'm getting older I am so much more comfortable in my own skin. But it's been a long and winding road thru Life to get to this point.

Several years ago  someone I knew quite well died.  I remember one time when she'd come over to have lunch with me at my house and she began to cry and told me she never felt like she had any friends.  It nearly broke my heart.  She was such a giving person, selfless in so many ways.  Whatever task she undertook she put her whole heart in to it.  A brilliant seamstress, she spent untold hours working on costumes for Sunday School projects.  Her artistic abilities were amazing.  And crafty?  She could take nothing and make something beautiful out of it.  I know that she struggled for acceptance amongst her peers and I don't think she ever found it, at least not on the level she so ached to attain.

And yet, when she died very tragically and unexpectedly in the prime of her life, you should have seen the amount of people at her funeral.  Kids she'd taught in Sunday School.  So many people whose lives she'd touched.


Someone came up to me not long after her funeral and remarked on what a beautiful service it had been.  Someone who'd never been particularly kind to my deceased friend.  She said, "You know, she was so well thought of and loved by so many people.  But I'm sure she knew it," and I know she was waiting for me to affirm that yes, this woman had known it.  I stood and looked at this person and didn't say a word.  Which made her very uncomfortable.  Then, a little less sure of herself she said, "She did know she was loved, didn't she?  I'm sure she did."  And again I said nothing.


When I did, I told her, "Actually, no.  She didn't."


And I turned and walked away.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~ Lao Tzu

Dear Hubby and I have never been known for being the sharpest tools in the shed.  This photo is proof of it.  In this part of the country, when people travel to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, they go in the summer months.  They go there to enjoy the beauty of the region and the majestic vastness of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.  Truly, they are inland seas, as my blog friend Alaine described them to me once.  Being a West Coast girl all my life I believed  there were no other 'beaches', no other 'shores' than those of the Pacific Ocean.  After crossing over the Mackinac Bridge, I changed my mind.  My first glimpse of the Lakes had my jaw dropping down in awe and all I could say, over and over, was "WOW!"

Do we go in the summer like most sane and sensible people?  Why, no.  We go now, in December, when it was in the teens and ice heaves like these are forming along the northern shore of Lake Michigan.  When the wind is howling at 40 miles per hour and the wind chill factor has the air temperature hovering at zero.  Why do we do things like this?  Well, partly because we're a little bit crazy.  And partly because we like doing things unconventionally.  This way we had the highways to ourselves.  This way we got to see what kinds of conditions the native "Yoopers" - as residents of the Upper Peninsula are called - live with in the off-season months.  From what we could see, they hunker down with plenty of wood stacked out in the woodpiles.  They have snow plows hooked onto the front of their pick ups or standing ready, leaning up against their garages.  The land is rugged and wild.  There are huge sand dunes and the wind whips off the tops of them in stinging sprays across the highway.  There are rough cabins and spectacular homes sharing space along the shore.  You can look out across the water and there is no land in sight.  It is, undoubtedly, some of the most beautiful land the good Lord has created on this earth.

I know before we moved to Michigan I'd heard of the Upper Peninsula.  I hadn't heard much.  I couldn't even remember much of the American History I'd learned about Michigan in high school...too many other states to learn about as well.  But since we've moved here just about everyone we've met has asked us, "Have you been to the UP yet?"  They ask it with kind of an affectionate pride in their voices, like they're talking about their kid or something.  When we'd say "No" they'd say, "Oh, but you gotta get up there!  It's one of the most beautiful places on earth!" and we'd smile politely and say, "Yes, we hope to soon."  And we'd talk about it but time just got away from us and we never made it during the tourist months.

But we made it in December.  And if you ask me, I think we hit it at its best time.  In its wild state.  When it felt like it belonged to no one but Dear Hubby and me.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. ~ Joan Didion

This morning I was reading the post of a young friend of mine on Facebook.  She'd received some Final Notices concerning medical bills for her children she thought had been paid by her medical insurance a couple of months ago.  She spoke of how stressed she was.  I could so relate to her situation and her feelings.

Once upon a time, I was a young mother facing a mountain of medical bills.  And we didn't have medical insurance at the time.  I had given birth to my 12-pound son by emergency c-section.  He and I were in the hospital for almost a week.  There were the room costs, the nursery costs, the operating room costs, the anesthesiologist bill, my doctor bill.  Bills, bills, bills.  Dear Hubby was the sole breadwinner and made less than $5 per hour.  We had a two-year-old daughter.  We were young, desperate, and very scared.

Luckily a friend of ours worked at the small town hospital where I'd given birth.  She was able to provide us with some paperwork to fill out to help us with the hospital bill, as long as we qualified.  Boy, did we ever qualify!  On top of everything else, our son had picked up staph infection in the hospital and was a very sick little baby.  The hospital 'forgave' us our entire bill.

Which left us with all the doctor and anesthesiologist bills. 

As Christians we felt compelled to pay off those bills, even tho the amounts seemed astronomical, especially my doctor's.  We barely had two nickels to rub together but I sat down and wrote letters to the anesthesiologist's and my doctor's business offices, telling them we had no medical insurance but we would pay every penny owed to them because we were Christians, no matter how long it took.  This was back in 1978.  The anesthesiologist's amount was something like $275 and we got that paid off fairly quickly...within a year, I believe.  The doctor bill was closer to $1000.  Some months I was able to send $5, some months $50...$10 here, $20 there.  Slowly, slowly it dwindled down.  And finally I came to the point where I wrote out the final check and sent it off.  Our son was almost 5 at the time, and we'd moved from that town, eventually landing in Portland where we lived until earlier this year.  As we moved, I could've easily not sent my forwarding address to them.  I could've skipped town and never paid off that debt.  But pride and a strong sense of right versus wrong kept me true to my word.  It gave me a great sense of satisfaction, dropping that envelope into the mailbox.

The funny thing is, a week or so later I got a card from my doctor's office in the small town.  A Thank You card, from the office manager.  She wrote and told me how the whole office had been aware of what a struggle it had been for us to pay off that bill.  And when they received the final payment, how good it made them feel.  She said it restored their faith in people, a person who actually kept their word and did such a thing.  She said it didn't happen like that very often.  She wished us the best, on all their behalf.

I sat and stared at that card in amazement.

You see, we go about our lives making simple decisions, to do what's right.  And we go about our business and faithfully send off that money, figuring it's just going into the doctor's bank account and the amount due is a little less each time the bill shows up regularly in the mail month in, month out.  You have no idea what kind of an impression something that seems so mundane to you such as paying a bill might be making on someone else.  An entire doctor's office, for instance.

And then you sit there with the proof of what it has meant to those people held in your hand.  And you feel very humbled, because it is a testimony to them what God has done for you in your life.  Made you honest.  Made you a person of your word.

And 33 years later, it is a memory that is still very precious to me.

A beautiful Michigan sunrise.

Just thought I'd share it.

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree. ~ Roy L. Smith

This turned out kind of dark, probably because I took it with my Android phone late this evening and the cards are on the floor.  But I want to talk about Christmas cards.

I love Christmas cards.

These are the first ones that have arrived in the mail in the past few days.  From friends and family scattered far and wide.  Some with Christmas letters, some without.  I learned that Cousins Mark and Martha flew to New York City in October all the way from Woodlake, California, for their 25th wedding anniversary.  I heard of one friend whose husband built a new house for them that they moved into this year in British Columbia, Canada.  I heard from some dear neighbors in Portland who told us we have a package of surprise goodies coming to help us celebrate...probably some of her excellent Baklava!  A card with an oil painting of Mt. Hood a friend painted.  Another beautiful handmade card a new friend of mine here in Michigan made. Lots of photo cards with the smiling faces of those who are near and dear to us...separated by many miles but still so close to us in heart.

Christmas cards just make me feel...good.

I had mentioned to a friend on Facebook the other day that I've gone thru 4 or 5 books of stamps getting all of ours sent out this year.  In years past, at least for friends within our Portland church, we had pigeon holes set up in a hallway to put our Christmas cards in and it cut the cost by quite a margin.  But I don't have that luxury now...all my cards are stamped and addressed and sent out in the mail.  She said, "Why not send them by email?  Lots of people do that."  I thought about that for a moment and I said I guess I'm old-fashioned but I like getting them in the mail.  How it's so nice to open the mail box and find a bunch of cards tucked in with the junk mail and bills.  To hold them in my hands, read the messages, and appreciate the fact someone took the time to send one to us. 

I know it's a dying tradition.  Our lives are rife with dying traditions.  But as long as I have the ability to hand write and as long as I have your snail mail address...if you're someone near and dear to me, you're getting a Christmas card.

End of story.

We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty. ~ Marcus Fabius Quintilian

Facebook.

I hate it.  I love it.

Recently I've connected on Facebook with someone I've known for years but not really known.  Just peripherally in the past.  And he mentioned he's getting to know some of the people from our church's faith better on Facebook than he ever knew them in the past.  Me, too.  He moved to South Africa many years ago and made his life there.  I remember him as a much younger man, the son of one of the pastors.  I don't think I've spoken to him in my life face-to-face.  And he's such a nice man.  If I wasn't on Facebook we probably never would've truly 'met'.  That's one of the things I love about Facebook.

What do I hate?  It's such a time-robber.  At least it is right now while I'm on hiatus from doing the daily day care for my two little grandsons.  I get on there and I can get lost in playing word games.  The next thing I know, I look at the clock and an hour has passed by.  But this morning I went over to my son's house to pick up Dear Hubby's cell phone that he'd accidentally left there yesterday when he stayed with Dylan and Cooper for a few hours while the kids took my d-i-l's mother on a tour of downtown Detroit.  Ursula told me she's most likely leaving sometime this week for Texas so I'll begin taking care of the boys again.  I've missed them something terrible so it'll be nice to get back into the swing of things again.  And that also means much less computer time.  So I'll try to balance Facebook and blogging again.  Blogging usually loses, ha!  Facebook is so easy and accessible.  Blogging takes quiet and concentration.  And a mind that's relatively alert.

Even on my best days, a mind that's relatively alert usually eludes me.

But I'll give it my best shot.

This one, for my own reasons, is dedicated to someone very near and dear to my heart.

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A very cold and clear sunset this evening.

I love the variation of light,

from rose to pale lavender.

Where thou art - that - is Home. ~ Emily Dickinson

Home.

Sweet home.

I had Dear Hubby take this photo of our house this morning.  I am feeling too sick to venture very far from the comforts of the living room.  This was taken just as the sun was coming up, casting its golden glow over the bricks and rock on the front of the house.

It came to me recently just how much this lovely little house has truly become "home".

On Thursday Dear Hubby and I had dinner at a restaurant out of town.  And not even half an hour later I was beginning to feel quite poorly.  To make matters worse, we were several miles from home.  All during the ride back all I thought was, "I can't wait to get home!"  To my bed.  To my pillows. 

And as we were driving along it occurred to me.

There was no thought of Portland as home any more.  Not even remotely.

Here is my home.  

My comfort zone.

The only place I wanted to be.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. ~ Virginia Woolf

I was going thru my archives of about a bazillion different photos and graphics when I came across this one.  I was looking for another photo for today's entry but when I came to this one my whole train of thought shifted and I decided to use this one instead and save the other for another day.  If I ever find it, that is...I really do have a lot stored away, considering I've written close to 2,000 blog entries the past 5 years.

This photo is one my Dear Hubby took a few Christmas seasons ago.  He'd gone hunting at his cousin Ed's house which is just across the road from this one.  This house has special memories for Dear Hubby...it is the farm homestead of his maternal grandparents who originally emigrated from Austria in the very early 1900s.  They settled in Canada, to begin with, then came to Oregon City.  Dear Hubby's mother, the last of 14 children, was born here in 1929.  When I married Dear Hubby in 1974 only a handful of the children had passed away.  As I write this, my mother-in-law and two of her brothers are still alive.  But one is terminally ill with cancer and may die within days.

Dear Hubby spent a good portion of his early years in this house.  His mother worked so his grandmother took care of him and one of his sisters during the day.  His grandma never learned to speak much English.  When they moved to Oregon this house was far enough out in the country that she rarely went to 'town' so there was little need for her to speak anything more than the basics.  Dear Hubby tells me he never spoke German but he could understand it when his grandmother spoke it to him.  This house was the Sunday gathering place after church when everyone who could would come over for dinner.  Dear Hubby had something like 60 first cousins so I can just picture little ones frolicking all over the yard, the porch, the fields.  They were a big, boisterous group.  I don't know if the accordions and the spoons were brought out on any of these Sundays but I've been to wedding celebrations where they were and the family would dance polkas and the Schottische.   There was a lot of life lived in this house.  But, like with all families, parents aged and died.  Sadly, the house was sold outside of the family tho Cousin Ed still lives across the road in the house he grew up in, and family still lives scattered all over the nearby area.

I don't exactly envy Dear Hubby for this rich heritage but I often wonder what it must have been like growing up surrounded by so much family.  He had cousins who were as close to him as siblings.  So, as he took this untouched photo that day, I wonder at the memories that must have been moving at lightning speed thru his mind.  Picturing his parents as their younger selves, seeing his long-gone grandparents and aunts and uncles.  Picturing himself, a skinny little dark-haired boy playing in the yard.  Eating all the wonderful food prepared and served in that house. 

I never had that, growing up.

Maybe...on second thought...I do envy him after all.