lilymaid7

I've lost a lot in my fairly short life, had things slip away because of chance or foolishness in myself or foolishness in others.  However, I've held more in my hands than most people ever do.  I have things that nothing in all of creation can take from me.

I shouldn't be sad for long.  My life is rich and blessed and always will be.

The sun shines, my flowers will bloom this coming spring, whatever garden they're in.  I have love of a sort that is not shaken.  Beauty is always present, and is there to comfort us when we are willing to look up from our little sorrows and see it.

I have the love of my caring and understanding mother and father, my thoughtful sister, my encouraging brother, my sister who makes me laugh.  I have the love of their sweet wee ones who draw their auntie glorious things in crayons to make her smile.  I have the love of many aunts and uncles, and of my grandfather, with his odd humor and his matter of fact approach to life, and my grandmother, with her deep spiritual strength.

I've had hands I held slip from mine as well, but I know that I was loved.  I know I loved in return.  I know I am not the only one that wept.  As for me, love is worthwhile no matter how it ends.  So many people go through life and never really know it.  They may not weep like I do, but I pity them.  They miss too much of life.

I've held a lot, and known deep joy.  I've lost much, and wept from my very soul.  I'd not undo any of it.  And, wherever my path leads, I will be alright.

"Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee." Isaiah 26:3

My life has been a bit too fun of late. . .

www.pandora.com/

I found this by way of an Irish music forum I post silly things to.  It made me happy.  It has Martin Carthy and stuffs.   (Not that anyone but me knows who he is. )

I put this in a little book I bound for my dear and loving spouse-to-be last St. Valentine's.

I think it's quite appropriate for him.  In just a week we'll have been married 6 months.  Makes me feel old.   All this being expected to be a grown up at once was a bit challenging, but I have never before found meeting challenges so rewarding, and I couldn't possibly have a kinder, more paitient helper.

To my Dear and Loving Husband
Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife were happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so perservere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

To counteract my last, less than happy journal entry, I will make one for the sheer sake of amusement. . .

He recently advised me on how to deal with unpleasant social situations.  It amused me greatly.

"I'm hateful and horrible and nobody bothers me." -Merlin Fredrick

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My grandfather grew up in a rural part of the frozen north back when they used horses to plow fields.  He is the little boy in knee breeches with carefully combed hair in more formal photographs, and the smallest person out with the threshing crew in others.  He was always quite mischevious and the trait has not lessed with age.

Now, as my father-in-law informs me, people did scary things to entertain themselves before they had tv.   My grandfather and a friend of his took it into their little heads to make parachutes from handkerchiefs.  Of course, they wanted to test their new creations, so they affixed the parachutes to some gophers they had caught and dropped them off of the the town water tower.  My grandfather had not given careful consideration to the potentially messy consequences should the parachutes fail to work.  Neither the grown-ups in town, nor the gophers were pleased with the result, to say the least.