From My Journal: Heavy Heart

October 10, 2011: These past days I have had a sad and heavy heart. We found out that Randall, Naomi's partner died about a week and a half ago. I sat down this morning to send a card from all of us and the tears finally started to come. It was Aspen's phrase, “Randall was such a good man” that choked me up. I know death awaits us all whether good or bad, rich or poor, young or old. But Randall was indeed one of the saints and he died much too young. I cry for Naomi and her daughters. I find I have this permeable, sensitive nature that crawls inside other people's emotions. So there I am with Naomi and her family, feeling all her feelings of losing the man she loved for nearly forty years. I don't really know Naomi well. I see her as a compassionate human, grounded in civic and neighborhood giving, reason and practicality. But whether we are emotional or practical, grief is grief, loss is loss. I find the older I become the more I see how difficult and tremendously sad our living can be.

Words are not flowing through my fingers. I am struggling to express myself. What I feel over Randall's death is so much more than the loss of a good man. I selfishly see that he is my age and I cry because life is too short and I can't seem to grab it by the tail and swing it down and capture it. Even if I try to close my hands around my days, the minutes, the hours, sift through them at tremendous unstoppable speed. I am frantic. I want to grow old. For I now see that my sixties are but the child of my older age. I want to have at least thirty more years and I feel so greedy for wanting more life when a friend has died.

I don't want to waste my days though I know I do. I want to give myself over to my passions without allowing my fears to block the way. At least I'm here trying to write. I'm here trying to carve out my feelings. What I know is love is my main passion: giving love, lessening the hate, lessening the differences, spreading an appreciation of diversity and our connections as mortal human beings. After writing Naomi a note, I also sent Oksana's nine year old daughter, Anna, a card. I want her to know how beautiful and special she is. There is death but there continues to be life.

Last night at our full moon, I came to Lilly's with my weighty heart. I thought I didn't want to be there. I was a huge lump in a chair, waiting for our potluck to begin. Why am I in such a hurry? Why do I think “being on time” has any relevance? Why do I think my time is wasted when I wait for others to “be on time”? I want desperately to let go of prediction, judgment, categorizing time. I want to melt into each moment, be surprised, be present to what is given, let go of expectations. Once I ate, once I relaxed, once I told myself that in grief can also be joy and gratitude for simply standing on the earth's abundant ground, I discovered I could laugh and lighten my load. The nearly full moon broke through the clouds with our sound and music making. The energy was as bright as the moon. Last night I literally felt the moon's presence embrace me and the blessings of nature caress me. I knew then it was OK to enjoy the evening. Randall would want everyone to love what they were doing. I sensed for a few moments Randall was all right in the spirit world. He appreciated his life. He had more love and fulfillment than most and wisely knew what being truly human means.

My sadness continues but writing about brings me some comfort. My words are my stepping stones to understanding. We had the perfect, mostly clear sky evening last night. It was as if the sky held the tears behind the clouds so we could dance and sing and connect with each other. This morning the rain has returned with an intense vengeance. The darkness is there at the peripheral edge of my vision. I want to shake my brain and tell myself I know what's important and everything else doesn't matter. I'm here now at this kitchen table in the warmth of my cozy home writing these cherished words. I am alive!

© 2011

Golden Harvest Moon

It's early September and we are going camping. After over five years away, we (Dan, our daughter, our dog, Lacey, and I) are returning to our Shadow Bay campsite at Waldo Lake. This was our place each August during our daughter's growing up years. Here Lacey experienced her first adventures in the wild and nearly had the pleasure of eating a live chipmunk (it got away). Here our five year old daughter had her first small, inflatable raft and rowed herself to the miniature island off shore. We discovered frogs; we discovered picnicking and swimming at an inlet bay cove where the crystal speckled water reflected the clearness of the sky above; we discovered floating butterflies...we discovered life.

Time has a way of disappearing behind the clouds of our days. On September 1, the daughter turned 22; on August 24th, Dan turned 61 and on August 18th, I turned 64. We call this birthday season, and have always celebrated for the three solid weeks. This year, we thought we would come together for a kind of birthday reunion, thus the camping trip. Since our extremely loyal and saint of a dog Lacey is 14 (98 in dog years) years old, we figured this would be her last camping trip. Her arthritis makes it difficult for her to hike long distances and so we planned to take turns being with her.

I've learned that events planned can rarely be “planned.” I have this foolish tendency to envision how I want experiences/interactions to be but have to remember to simply let go into the moments that present themselves.

Our daughter calls the day before our trip. She asks for medical advice and I tell her “come home and we'll take care of you.” On my side of the phone conversation, I silently smile, thinking I might get a chance to be a mother again. I make her an appointment at our clinic, for the next morning. Whether we go camping or not is not as important as our daughter's health. When I see her that evening (noting how she exaggerated the nature of the malady) and especially after her visit with her favorite nurse practitioner, I know it will be OK and that we will be able to have our Waldo Reunion. What I don't expect is a return of her teenage-like, sulky moodiness.

Is the umbilical cord between mother and child ever really cut? I feel every nuance of the dark shadows crossing my daughter's face as we set up our tents, organize our “kitchen” and swat at the mosquitoes. My heart is heavy when I want it to be light. Feeling my intense concern, I'm sure the daughter simply needs to wallow in aloneness. I become too motherly, as I usually do, and wallow in my own alien emotions. I revert to words as bandages rather than giving intuitive, caring space. We are back to the push-pull of a mother and daughter's struggle for separation when all I want this birthday season is to cherish our small window of being together.

By early evening, while there is still daylight, we stroll the forest paths, sharing early memories of kayaking the lake's expansive, bluest waters and hiking the perimeter with the young Lacey who once energetically ran back and forth with us on the trails. Waldo's magic is seeping through our feet as we reenter our camp and my daughter and I build a bug-repellant fire while Dan begins to prepare dinner. We thought if we waited until September the bug population would have dwindled to nearly zero, but they are exerting with a vengeance their will to hang on. There is a bit of irritability in the air, a tease that says nothing is perfect nor will it ever be. My daughter's sadness has become my sadness. I want desperately to shake off my over-sensitive, vulnerable nature. Instead I'm swatting at mosquitoes and wondering if we will make it through several days of this.

Our simple pasta dinner tastes miraculous, as only meals eaten around a camp fire can, and the wine has given us a mellow glow. Our daughter's face has softened as she brings out a guitar. She asks if we mind if she plays and we are flattered she would let us into her musical world. I am sitting across from her as she begins to strum a few tunes she has composed herself. She has her father's musical gift of knowing music from the inside of her soul rather than from notes on a page. As she plays, singing with a louder more mature voice, I feel the gift she is giving us of being able to understand her words.

We are sitting in a circle, Dan, Aspen and I, surrounded by these tall, majestic, silhouetted trees up the hill to our left and Waldo's sunset, lapping waters down below to our right. A golden moon is slowly making its way between two of the pines and even the mosquitoes have bought into the evening's hush. I am intently watching Aspen's now-beaming happy countenance as she hands Dan the guitar for his turn at our family serenade. All our voices become woven together in the singing of old, familiar songs. The darkness, the vision of my dearest daughter and her love of music, Dan's focus on his own skilled strumming, make it easier for the tears to come. Stop crying, I tell myself. Stop being so dramatic. But I can't help it. Here is the moment I've been waiting for. Here is the moment I want to remember. As if on cue, a flash of rain-portending lightening trembles through the sky. The tears flow freer as I reflect upon how much I love living, how much I love my family, how much I will miss these magical, unplanned moments of life when I die.

The next day Lacey and I stand on the smooth sandy shore and wave as Dan and our daughter row out towards the far end of the lake. I feel as though I am saying a forever good-bye as I quickly pull Lacey along the bark strewn paths to the next clearing and catch another glimpse of my beloved family. Where in the beginning their paddles had bobbled and clashed, now the daughter and dad are in sync. And I ponder how much more alike in take-it-as-it-comes personalities these two are. With Lacey beside me, I write and read and sense something is missing. A resolution of life's ever present sadness? An embrace of the change to joy? How sadness and joy are merely the flip sides of the same coin?

The husband and daughter return with the daughter wet from head to toe. “She jumped into the nearly ice cold water,” tells Dan admiringly. It's like our daughter has been baptized by her swim, for as I look into her vibrant, contented face, I can see she has been reborn. Later at twilight, with the comfort of the trees, the stillness of the waters, the shadows cast by the boulders, my daughter and I meander and meditate on memories gleaned from the passing years.

“Do you remember our fictional frog stories and how on our evening flashlight walk we nearly stepped on those little frogs?

Do your remember rafting to and spending all day on your island?

Do you remember trees catching on fire?

Do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

Can I add another memory? Can I add this story of the golden, harvest moon?

© 2011

Hummingbird

It's morning. I awake and find myself wishing for an uplifting experience. Everywhere I turn lately there is sad or tragic news. America's politics is sorely and scarily lacking in reason; a Black man, who I signed a petition for, is executed in Georgia and might have been innocent; several new movies out are about people finding romance while they are dying...I could go on but writing it all down is making me depressed. I need to find some joy, I tell myself; I need to have a sign of hope.

As I am doing last night's dishes, there it is, my hopeful emblem. I watch intently as a flitting hummingbird rises above my plum red perennials. She perfectly balances herself mid-air and then flies off. How beautiful and wondrous, I think. Then the deepest azure, blue jay appears on the chrysanthemums. He seems to be searching the garden for someone. Another bluest jay sits camouflaged on a finger-thin branch up in our flowering cherry tree quietly scanning the horizon. The eyes of the two birds meet. Their songs float between them and then in a finger snap they both fly together towards a fir tree across the street.

In gratitude I bow to the simple, yet magical scene of daily living outside my window. It is enough to momentarily lift my spirits. Dear Mother Earth, dear majestic realms of the natural world, I want to remember you are always here whenever I open my eyes and heart. I get so caught up in my small, small world and forget there is the constant companionship of myriad trees nearby or the sweet melodious sounds of frogs, crickets and fowl on the Amazon canal, or the frolicking teasing of squirrels in my own back, cedar enclosed, garden.

My heart has been heavy lately and my voice has been stuffed with the pain of my own creating. I've been spending too much time alone, waiting for my school year as a home instruction teacher to begin, waiting for the days of summer to blend into the days of autumn, waiting for new dreams and purpose to enter my line of vision. We are our thoughts, I am told; we are what we can imagine; we are our own self-creators. I've been stuck and struck dumb and numb, telling myself being stuck is fine because that's where I am.

Time is leaving me behind and I figure because time runs away so quickly that my sour mood will runaway quickly too. Why is it, though, that the events, feelings, experiences we want to pass us by linger on and on, while the positive ones are over in a lightening flash? Like the hummingbird moment...I want to capture this raising of the soul's essence and put it in a treasure box. Then whenever I want I can open this box and observe my hummingbird one more time. But life doesn't work like this. Life's precious moments pass and cannot be recaptured.

I want my good memories more accessible and my bad ones buried beneath a pile of debris. But I have this tendency to remember the words wrongly spoken or the needed words not spoken at all. The creative optimist becomes unseen under a stack of wishes and regrets. Like Alice's white rabbit, I tell myself there is no time and I run away faster from all I want to be and do. I am becoming lost in metaphor and lost from my own blue jay intuitive communication. I want to come out the other side...an other side I imagine as a kind of heaven to my self-imposed hell. Wasn't it in Paradise Lost where Milton reminds us we can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell?

The answers are blindingly simple to any question I pose. The up to the down, the forward from the back, the turn around is there before me...there right outside my window. If only I'd remember to look and see.

© 2011

Tarot Thirteen

On my birthday I drew Death, the Thirteenth Tarot Card. At first I sucked in my breath and wanted to quickly shove it back into the pile. Twenty six years ago, on my father's birthday, which coincided with Winter Solstice, I had a Tarot reading done with the Death Card appearing on the top. A week later my father fell from a rickety ladder as he was sweeping the leaves from the roof of our childhood home and died. Thus, my reticence. What my heart told me then and now is that this death card does not predict imminent physical death, though I know my death is out there, but spiritual, emotional, even mental transformation.

Just before picking the death card, I glanced at the bottom of the newly shuffled deck and there was the Wind Mother Card. So when the death card was revealed, my first thought went to the death of the mother. My Aquarius mother died last July and I have since found myself obsessed with the aging and dying process. As the oldest sibling with both parents gone, I am theoretically the next in line to walk the plank. I have been reflecting all year on my own death, so drawing the death card seems a natural outcome of these thoughts. I have gone through periods of extreme anxiety, afraid to close my eyes as I attempt to fall asleep and have often felt overwhelmed by the shortness of my life and the need to leave behind a positive legacy.

There is also the death of myself as a mother. My daughter will be twenty-two tomorrow and I must be a slow learner: as much as I continually let her go as she grew up, her final flight to independence has given me pause as I grieve the loss of the mothering phase and question my childless future. I gave more than I ever thought possible to motherhood and truly loved this role. It has been three years since the “empty nest” began and though I am more grounded in my new life, I still weep on the way home from visiting my daughter.

This umbilical cord connecting mothers and daughters must be strong. It stretches over miles and miles. I never felt close to my mother, but her final years brought out my love for her. I found that, as she lay dying, all I wanted was to be with her, in any way possible, so she wouldn't have to be alone. For months after her death, I didn't feel she was gone at all. I still sometimes sense her presence. Each sunrise and sunset brings the balance of living and dying. More than ever before, I know I have but this one last part of my life to truly be present.

As I watch myself wasting time on trivial worries and banal anger, I wonder if the dramas, the misunderstandings, the churning, anxious, self-generated emotions even matter. The death card reminds me that nothing matters. The death card tells me to get over myself, to bury the maiden and the mother and to embrace the crone. My mother never embraced her aging, rather little by little she let it squeeze her into an unhappy hole of complaint and negativity. How do I not repeat her path? This summer, the exuberance of the sixties has gradually taken over my fears. I close my eyes with gratitude for each day: each conversation, each book, each meal. I treasure and try to understand each emotion, each thought, each moment of awe. I have cherished being physically alive by hiking, biking, and kayaking. My garden has been my tranquil, bountiful place, and I have soaked in the daily lessons plants, trees and other growing things have offered me.

“Death is always on one's shoulder,” writes Carlos Castaneda in The Teachings of Don Juan. This past year has been intense. Though scared, I have sat with death; though foolish, I have run away from time, and thus from mortality. I have poked and prodded and lived with my phobias. I have reasoned and reflected; I have weeped and written. I drew Tarot Thirteen on my 64th birthday. This wrestling with death, with time, with the dark shadows has only begun. I drew the card of death, but I drew a final chance to fully and righteously live.

© 2011

Letter to Michelle Bachmann

Dear Ms. Bachmann: I am writing to you as a parent and as an American citizen who believes in our founders' constitutional creation of “liberty and justice for all.” I have heard that you also believe in our constitution. As a mother of five, I am certain you can understand a mother's love for her child. I am also certain you love each and every one of your children unconditionally, and want only that they are happy, productive adults. I love my daughter beyond words and as her mother I am saddened by the hate speech I hear coming from you and your husband's mouths. You see my twenty-one year old daughter is a beautiful, confident, compassionate Lesbian. Rather than being influenced by Satan, I see my daughter's Queerness as a deeply spiritual gift. She has dared to become her authentic self in a world that encourages conformity. She did not choose to be who she is and she cannot change who she is. She simply is the incredible human being she is suppose to be.

That you desire to become the President of the United States baffles me. To me our President needs to be held to a higher, moral standard of character. Our President needs to strive for fairness and inclusivity. Our President needs to at least respect the American citizens he or she are working for. I do not want to hear purposeful, divisive hate speech coming from the leader of my democratic country. You say you want to reinstate Don't Ask Don't Tell. LGBTQ soldiers have and are giving their lives for this country. I believe their blood also bleeds red, white and blue.

According to you and your husband, Gay people are psychologically messed up and sub-normal human beings, in bondage, despair, and enslavement. Please, Ms. Bachmann, would you appreciate such an unscientific labeling of your children, family and friends? Along with my daughter, I have known and have a multitude of Gay friends and other family members. No doubt you have unknowingly met many wonderful Gay people. The Gay community is a part of every nation, every state, every provence, every city, every community around the world. My Gay friends, family and acquaintances are attending college, have careers, are loving parents, are community volunteers, are church members. I do not want my President to be so blatantly ill-informed.

I understand you have signed a pledge to create a constitutional amendment to ban Gay Marriage. As a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) mother, I strongly believe the tide is turning, and equality cannot be stopped. Recent polls show the majority of Americans now believe Gays should be allowed to marry. What concerns me more is your pledge to investigate LGBTQ people who you believe are harassing people who share your particular beliefs on this topic. I do not want to go into the centuries of harassment, up to and including murder, that homosexuals have undergone. But please go to the Internet site, www.itgetsbetter.com to hear first hand of the suffering homosexuals have and still do experience during their growing-up years. No youth deserves such treatment. No youth deserves such hate and violence. And no youth should commit suicide because he or she feels so threatened and harassed that his or her life is not worth living.

I am not asking you to change your beliefs, but rather to embrace your Christian faith. For Jesus preached love not hate, the embracing rather than the distancing of one's neighbor. All I am asking, Ms. Bachmann, is that you try to change your blatantly hurtful, vitriolic words towards other human beings. During these deeply troubled and difficult times, I want my President to be a uniter rather than a divider. Sincerely, Victoria Koch, PFLAG mother, teacher, writer

© 2011

Bee Stings

Yesterday morning I was watering my garden when I noticed a group of bees or wasps circling around the zinnias. The larger bumble bees have been congenial all summer long so I spoke a few gentle words to these insects and paid them no mind. As I was expecting a call, I had my cell phone in my pocket and when it rang, I forgot about the bees and the direction of my watering. As the call ended I discovered a nipping at the bottom of my neck and a small disturbance inside my hair. I flicked my hair with one hand and that's when the trouble started. This darn wasp was lost in the jungle and in his or her effort to find a way out, she went under my shirt. Now I started panicking, lifting my shirt, flipping my head down, listening to the dreaded buzzing. I felt the sting on my back and another sting at the base of my neck and then with a final show of “take that,” I felt a sting on my upper lip.

I stopped watering, went inside and applied ice, took a homeopathic remedy and felt silly about how aggravated I'd gotten. I found myself shaking as I sat down in the arms of my comforting leather chair, with a cup of tea. Try as I might to lessen the swelling, for the rest of the day I watched as my upper lip slowly became an elongated balloon. Slowly, though, I began seeing the bee stings and my reaction to them as one of those metaphoric lessons of life. I realized that whenever I have a disagreeable phone conversation, direct interaction or unpleasant experience, it's how I react that is more important than the event itself. Receiving three bee stings in my garden, I could easily see how these corresponded to my most recent life stings.

My sister called a few days ago after a silence of several months. This is typical of us, so I shouldn't make out that it is unusual. She lives in another state and in the past few years I have flown there several times. For several summers now, my sister tells me she's coming to my neck of the woods for a visit, and then cancels at the last minute due to insufficient funds. I won't go into her upper class life style, but the sting for me is she appears to honor money more than family. But my sister is who she is, and instead of getting upset every time I have a conversation with her, why not simply apply a cold pack and relax! Our mother died recently, and our being with our mother through this passage and our taking care of lose ends after she died brought us closer. I want to feel gratitude for these moments of bonding, and I want to become more accepting of what I perceive as my sister's need for a less intimate (than I would prefer) relationship. I want to share what I can about who I am, and listen when my sister tells me her story.

What I have always known is that a family will sting us many times with their judgments, self-interests or simple unconsciousness comments. I too have given my fair share of stings, so my reaction can only be to try to become the better person I know I can be.

Most of my stings come from irritating miscommunications with friends and acquaintances. Humans will say one thing and mean another and assume their personal intent is understood. I got frazzled this week by such a friend who sent an e-mail about getting together the upcoming week. I responded to a day she suggested and somehow...don't tell me how...she interpreted my response as meaning the day I chose on the week after the one she wrote about. I was sincerely baffled when she called to clarify her misunderstanding (because I had said see you tomorrow in my responding e-mail). But did I need to go ballistic after the phone call?

I suppose the most common stings come between mothers and daughters. I have deeply felt the hollowness of the empty nest phase, and am slowly getting back to my non-mothering self. What I find, though, is that I say the dumbest things when my daughter is around. I am in a sense stinging myself. I long to impress my daughter with the worthiness of her mother, and this usually backfires. I'll say what I really don't mean and know I am saying what I don't mean and watch anxiously as my daughter interprets my words, verbatim. The salve for this sting is humor, especially the ability to laugh at my awkward self. Plus, sharing my empty nest nervousness would allow her to see why her mother is such a communication weirdo.

I sit here with my upper lip looking like I had too much Botox. Damned wasps, for my daughter tells me they must be wasps because wasps are meaner. For every action in life does there have to be a reaction? Why not instead of ranting, sing? Instead of raving, laugh? Instead of irritability, dance? Stings are maddening, and the swelling lingers for far too long. Can I ignore the swelling after taking out the stinger and caring for the itch? I'll continue to try.

© 2011

Life's Crooked Mile

Nearing thirty my heart told me I was ready to meet my soul partner. I had had several long term relationships and thought I was deeply in love. After each break up, however, the missing pieces became visible. Friends laughed as I confided my confident belief: “I will know when I meet him that he is the one.” Even now as I write these words I am mystified by the magical coincidence of love. But then as I have continually reminded my dear husband: I believe there are no coincidences.

We met at a private, residential high school up in the hills of Ojai, California. We were both substitute teachers for the Spring Break week. Most of the students were on a school-sponsored ski vacation. Our job would be to “entertain” and “possibly teach” a group of male foreign students who chose to remain behind. The Friday before my assignment began I drove up to the school to meet with the lead teachers and the director. As I walked through the main door I spied a rather tall, blond, curly haired, slightly bearded fellow strolling towards me. Dressed in a red plaid wool shirt, jeans and heavy hiking boots, his kind blue eyes and inviting smile immediately drew me in. Like in a Broadway musical my heart went zing and a quiet voice inside me spoke: Here He Is!

We introduced ourselves and shook hands. Dan told me later he had no idea why he made the next move. But as we stood frozen and entranced by each other in the middle of the hallway, he spied a small, open room with a piano inside. As if being reeled by a fishing line into this room, suddenly we were sitting together on the piano bench and Dan was playing me a song he wrote: “On My Life's Crooked Mile.”*

“Maybe a thousand people have passed through my life
In the last few years
Ther've been friends and enemies and lovers
But the distinctions are no longer that clear
And time it always passes, and they come and they go
like opening and closing doors
it gets harder and harder to remember all the faces...
But I'll always remember yours...”

I was smitten with him from the very beginning. But as we were to work together for a solid week, I deferred thoughts about our potential relationship until the following Friday. Almost immediately we discovered we worked well together. Over coffee we planned several activities and lessons we thought these students might enjoy. The lessons flopped; the outings to parks and games of basketball and tennis received a lukewarm reception. During one of Dan's tennis matches, I unconsciously walked too close behind him and with his racket swinging back for a serve he hit me in the mouth. Apologies flowed freely but this event has become a humorous touchstone for the beginnings of our romance.

What our foreign students truly wanted was a field trip to Hollywood. We secured two vans and set as our educational destination the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. We left early in the morning for the several-hour journey. The museum only appealed to a few of our students and we finally agreed to cruise Sunset Boulevard and stop at Grauman's Chinese to view star foot and hand prints. Afterwards, we found a small and delightful ethnic restaurant and it was this meal that brought the most smiles to our guests. When we made it back to Ojai we sighed with relief: no one had gotten hurt and no one had gotten lost.

Friday finally arrived and we were both exhausted. My head rambled with thoughts: What's going to happen now? Will I ever see Dan again? Isn't this relationship meant to continue? Like shy and gangly children we both kept alluding to the end of our teaching job and wanting to do something to celebrate our success. Dan mentioned a unique restaurant up in the Ojai hills and a date for dinner became a reality.

Since Dan was renting a room from one of the teachers in Ojai, I drove to his place and then he drove us up through the mountains and canyons of Ojai to Casa Landucci. This restaurant is by far the most romantic place I have ever been. Nestled in the midst of a wide ravine and surrounded by rugged and lush hills, we sat on the deck sipping our wine and feeling nature's blessing upon our meeting. We talked and talked, ate and drank, as if we were the only survivors of our species at that time and at that place. We found ourselves totally comfortable in each other's presence and as many lovers before us have exclaimed: we felt as if we had known each other for years.

“Get you to the highway
anyway away from here, I raced
from Oregon to Guatemala
sweet liberation I've chased
and with all the hard lessons that bought me
I stand before a thousand more
but of all of the friends' loving arms that have caught me
I'll always remember yours...”


And today after our first hikes through the Ojai terrain and after our first runs through the California orange groves, and after packing all we owned in two vehicles and moving to Oregon and after raising our now twenty-one year old daughter, we have known each other for years and those thirty-four years are only the beginning.

“There is so much I wanted to say to you
before you touch that dial
but it mostly amounts to thank you, for being,
On my life's crooked mile.”

*“On My Life's Crooked Mile” song lyrics by Dan Fuehring

© 2011