Posts Tagged Friends

Just wanted to wish everyone a Blessed and Happy Thanksgiving! There is so much horror in our world, I am grateful to have at least one day out of the year to just focus on blessings. I am grateful, most of all, for my Husband, my Children, and my Mother. Running a very close 2nd are all of my wonderful and amazing friends who have supported, comforted, and lifted me up in prayer over this past year. I would surely be in a padded cell by now, if it weren’t for them!

We are headed out in a couple of hours to our friend, Tiffany Galozzi’s home, where we are going to enjoy her wonderful cooking and hospitality. Woo Hoo! Then, tomorrow, we start decorating the house for Christmas, and finish the day up at the Trans Siberian Orchestra concert down in Greenville.

I don’t  have anything in particular to say, really, just a lot of random thoughts I would like to share.  Starting with clothing.  Mom and I went Christmas shopping yesterday at the mall down in Greenville.  Our annual tradition is to find a really beautiful dress for Faith to wear for Christmas.  So, the hunt was on.  And on.  And on.  I am not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, and am very laid back about weird fashions, in general.  But I have reached the end of my tolerance on this.  “Skanky” is NOT a fashion.  It’s tacky, sleazy and I will not pay for it.  More importantly, my daughter doesn’t want to wear that sort of clothing, and even if she did, it ain’t happening!  Have you SEEN what they are selling to 11 year old girls????  Who decided that young girls were supposed to look like, ah, how shall I say this delicately. . . prostitutes???

We checked all the usual suspects: Dillards, Belk, etc.  We skipped Macy’s because they officially told their employees they were not allowed to wish anyone a Merry Christmas.  No more of my money for them.  I was getting really, really discouraged, when we finally ran across a store that still sells elegant, tasteful clothing.  Expensive, but worth it.  Thank God for Coldwater Creek!  We found some really lovely things there, and Faith is going to be so thrilled.  But not nearly as thrilled as Mom and I were to find decent clothing.

We found slinky shirts and scanty lingerie being passed off as formal gowns.  We found lots of clothing for the gang banger in your life.  We found some obscenely expensive t-shirts and ratty jeans.  I have to wonder what our world would be like if clothing companies, department stores, designers, etc. decided that they weren’t going to sell that sort of garbage anymore.  What if they decided to sell flattering, tasteful, simple clothing that made everyone look NICE?  Oops. . .sorry, I’ve slipped into my little fantasy again.  The same fantasy in which everyone spends an entire week saying only kind things to everyone they meet and the media only reports good, happy news.  Imagine with me what that would be like!!  Wow. . .

Okay, back on planet earth, I have some happy thoughts, too.  We helped out with a local organization’s Christmas gift distribution today.  The Storehouse here does an amazing job of taking care of folks in our community who are in need of food, clothing, whatever.  Lynn, the self-described “demented elf” is the lady who runs it, and she is nothing short of amazing.  Our 4-H club volunteered to help, along with lots of other homeschoolers and various others in our community.  There were literally thousands of gifts there!  It was heartwarming to me to see all the warmth and love there.  The kids were blown away by how many families were there because they couldn’t afford to buy presents for their children.  A real eye-opener, to be sure.

An added bonus was getting to see our old pastor and catch up with him for a bit.  He is a wonderful man, with a heart of gold and a warm loving spirit.  I got to see lots of other folks that I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and that was really nice.  With our upcoming move looming large, it’s a sweet blessing for me to get to visit with old friends before we leave.

And, no, we don’t know when we are planning to move.  Our house must sell first.  However, we have found a realtor that we really like: Janis Moore with Keller Williams.  She is sending a professional photographer to come take pictures of our home next week!  I am very hopeful.  Even in this economy, God can sell our house!

Tomorrow will find us back down in Greenville to do Christmas with my lifelong friend, Emily, and her family.  We pick a day every year to get together and exchange gifts and of course, eat!  We are all looking forward to that.  Then, on Sunday after Mass, our 4-H Club is going caroling.  Afterward, they are all coming over here for hot cocoa.

I have had a warm fuzzy feeling all day, and it was topped off tonight in the coolest way.  Faith and Alex each have a friend spending the night, and we hadn’t seen or heard any of them for quite a while.  I went up to check, assuming that the boys were probably playing video games, and that the girls were probably watching Christmas movies.  Nope.  All of them were playing a board game together, having a wonderful time!  And people ask me why we homeschool. . .

So, that’s it for my randomness tonight.  Now that my Adobe InDesign class is over I will have a bit more time for this blog.  I love it, but it has been really busy lately.  Peace, out.

This has been one of the longest weeks I can ever remember.  Starting out any week with mourning is always tough.  But, to add to the mix, on Monday night, Alex wrecked his new car.  He is okay, but his car is not. He is not sure what happened, but thankfully nobody else was involved.  He lost control of his car just past the Green River Bridge on 176.  He said he wasn’t speeding, and I believe him.  That is a really winding road, and it was a really dark night.  Interestingly, just a few days later, a friend of his lost control of her vehicle in almost the same spot.  Only she was luckier than Alex, and didn’t hit anything.  He hit an embankment.  Thanks be to God, because he could have ended up going over the edge of the road into a ravine.  So, anyway, once he’s done with Orphan Train, he is planning on going back to work to pay for damages to his little car.

Tuesday found me doing laundry and a bit of cleaning for Bonnie’s family.  Mom went to help, and that was really nice.  We came home to find Faith with a 102.8 degree fever, and her upper lip really swollen.  Note to anyone who might need this info:  Alleve can cause swelling and hives.  So, no more Alleve for Faith!  Benadryl seemed to fix the swelling, but she ran fever for another day, and started finally feeling better by Thursday.

Thursday afternoon we attended Bonnie’s funeral.  She was buried in an absolutely beautiful location, high up, overlooking the mountains.  It was a glorious autumn day, and I am sure I felt her smiling at all of us.  Her service was short and very sweet. Her pastor talked about how Bonnie had kept a journal, and in part of it she had made a list of the things she wanted to do before she died.  One of those things was hiking up to the top of a mountain with her family and singing “How Great Thou Art”.  Although her children didn’t get to go along,  she and her husband did do just that.  And I thought about how all the things I seem to want to do cost a lot of money and involve so much time.  Like travelling to Greece or Europe.  I think I am going to make a conscious effort to want the things that God gives to us for free.  I think there’s some sort of great wisdom buried in that simplicity.  It seems even in death, Bonnie is still teaching me!

Last night we had our Halloween Party, and it was nice.  Almost all of Kendall’s friends were unable to come because of a football game at Appalachian State, so it seemed much quieter than last year!  However, we enjoyed the friends that did come, and the food and games.

Today, as you may have noticed, has been spent updating my blog again.  I never did really get used to the ‘theme’ I was using.  Even though it was very customizable, it just wasn’t ‘me’.  I found one I really liked a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t had time until today to play with it and make it work.  I am very happy that I’ve been able to tweak the code to make everything that I was having trouble with work for me.  Let me know if you find anything strange that I need to fix, such as broken links or missing images, or places where images just don’t seem to fit right.

So, that concludes our long week.  Next week, with the election, may feel even longer.  God Bless America.

I just found out that my friend, Bonnie, went home to Heaven at 4:45 this morning.  Her family was with her, and her daughter, Laura, tells me it was very gentle and peaceful.

I spent the night with Bonnie in the hospital on Monday night.  It was a long night.  She had several seizures, and was unable to really tell me what she needed or wanted.  She was so restless, and my biggest task was probably keeping her untangled from her IV cord, catheter and bed sheets.  As I sat there in the deep hours of the night, watching over her and praying for her, I was struck by her youthfulness.  Her face was soft, like that of a young girl.  And her legs and feet looked like they belonged to a healthy young teen, not a woman dying from cancer.  It was all so surreal and incongruous.

Bonnie was so young!  Her birthday was earlier this month, and I know she was only a year or two older than me, so that would mean she turned 43 or 44.  She has four children.  I delivered her youngest child, Sarah, at home just twelve short years ago.  It seemed so strange to me, that the last night I’d spent with Bonnie was during her labor and birth, helping to bring life into this world.  And now I was once again spending the night with her, this time as she reached the end of her own life.

Bonnie is not the first friend I’ve had to die young.  Before I turned twenty years old, three of my friends took their own lives.  Two were killed in car wrecks. Yet another was a casualty of a gang fight.  It wasn’t his fight, but he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But it doesn’t really matter.  The end result is the same.  And the rest of us are left here on earth to make sense of it, somehow.

I don’t understand why Bonnie had to die so young.  I don’t understand how someone who had never smoked, drank, or eaten junk food could have cancer.  She told me that she had not gotten enough rest, and that when she did sleep, the room hadn’t been dark enough.  I told her that she was the only person on the planet who could say something like that, that the rest of us had a litany of health faux pas we could blame, but only she could say she should have gotten more rest!  She had never even taken so much as an aspirin until a year ago, when the lymphs in her armpit got so swollen and painful!  No, that will never make sense to me.

Our homeschooling community is grieving collectively.  Bonnie, in her quiet, gentle way touched so many of us very profoundly.  She was the kind of Christian “Proverbs 31″ woman that most of us can only hope to be.  She was so firm in her faith and convictions, yet never judgmental or legalistic.  She loved everybody without compromising her own faith or family.  Her children are a living legacy of her faith and beauty.  Her oldest two daughters are barely grown, but they already shine with the strong Christian Faith and Spirit of their mother. I have no doubt that her son and youngest daughter will, as well.  If all of us could be that sort of Christian, this world would truly be a different place.  She was the kind of friend who inspired me to be a better wife, mother, person.  And, without question, I am a better person for having known her.  I can only pray that I will grow to be more like her, and that maybe, in some small way, I can pass on the many blessings she gave to me to someone else.

We had a really big thunderstorm tonight. While it was still raining, and the sun was just barely beginning to glow behind the clouds, the most magnificent rainbow I’ve ever seen emerged across the entire sky! It was so big I could not capture all of it in one photograph! But I tried. I ran outside, in the cold and blustery rain, and stood out there like a crazy person pointing my camera into the sky. It was truly the most beautiful and bright rainbow I’ve ever seen!

And there are a couple of analogies I’d like to make here. First, I would have never seen it if my friend, Lisa, hadn’t called me to tell me about it. Sometimes, I would completely miss God if it wasn’t for my friends helping me out. Second, the storm was not completely over. It was still raining, the wind was still blowing. But at the sight of that glorious rainbow, the storm was forgotten, and nothing else mattered. God was in the storm.

I do not believe it is an accident that God placed His first rainbow in the sky as a promise to us. Every time I see a rainbow, I think of God, and of how much He loves all of us. I am reminded that He is even more glorious and magnificent than any rainbow, and that it is a symbol of His faithfulness. The storm does not have to be over before we find God. Even in the storm, that rainbow outshone everything around it. And isn’t that just like God?