orvieto. that’s in italy.

     sitting here on this november night in my buttoned-up pacific northwest house while sleet pelts our neighborhood streets it’s hard to fathom the fact that right now ~ right this very minute ~ middle-aged italian women are climbing out of bed to begin their saturday morning chores in this little-and-just-too-charming-for-words tuscan hilltown.  it’s name is orvieto.  and while my overloaded imagination tries hard to convince my disbelieving head there’s a good chance i’ll actually get to walk its winding streets with my own two feet in just over ten months. 

earlier this fall steve and i started talking about finally visiting europe (we middle classers really can save enough airmiles, if we’re patient) and for my birthday last week he presented me with the plan for actually paying for it without breaking the bank OR our economic future, which went wayyy beyond making my day to making my decade. (!!!)

so now i’m e-mailing and having delightful telephone conversations with real live people in italy, switzerland, and france named celeste and francesca and diana and kamel and dear 90-something walter who wake up every morning in the places i have dreamed about for so many years.  unbelievable.  you’ll probably get sick of hearing about all of this before we actually get there next september but i’ll probably keep writing, anyway.

because i can. 

 

a class act, in my book.

to begin with let me just say the first birthday present i received last night is simply amazing and i’ll be telling you all about it soon enough.  a hundred thousand thanks, steve ~ it’ll be a great adventure, for sure. 

but for now, i am still smiling at the last one that came to me, as the evening wound down, from the boys from the bronx! 

say what you will about their front office, but those gentlemen in blue did something truly great on that ballfield, and this is ONE trueblue mariner fan who was jumping up and down last night for a stellar effort and a magnificent ending to the 2009 yankees/phillies world series.

my hat is especially off to andy pettite, mariano reviera, mark texeira, jorge posada, and their manager, joe girardi, whose lives off the field are marked by the character of the One they have put their faith in 24/7.

and listen to what happened to joe on the way home from the game…

EASTCHESTER -
   On his way home from winning the World Series, Yankees Manager Joe Girardi stopped to help a woman who had lost control of her car on the Cross County Parkway and crashed into a wall. 
     “The guy wins the World Series, what does he do? He stops to help,” said Westchester County police officer Kathleen Cristiano, who was among the first to arrive at the accident scene. “It was totally surreal.”
     As officers came upon the accident scene, in an area where the parkway’s two lanes turn into three and cars speed by the curve that takes them to the Hutchinson Parkway, officer Cristiano spotted Girardi.
     He was jumping up and down, trying to flag me down,” she said. “You don’t expect him standing by a car accident trying to help.”
     Girardi, who was dressed in a casual T-shirt and jeans, then told them he “had to get going.”  Cristiano and Henry both thanked him and watched as he ran across traffic again to reach his car.
     ”The driver didn’t know it was him until after I told her,” Cristiano said.  The area is notorious for its blind spots, and Girardi, who had parked his car along the right side of the parkway, and then run across the traffic to get to the injured motorist, put his life at risk, police said.

congratulations, gentlemen.  you’re a class act, in my book.  and thanks for the win on my 54th birthday! 

 

u-turn, right here.

 ask cindy or sue what (besides speed) they’ll remember most about our on-road california adventures and i suspect they would respond in-unison-with-an-eyeroll:  ”u-turns!”.   and i will readily admit it ~ i’m guilty.  i love u-turns.

admittedly, the six-lane boulevaards of palm desert make them easier than a crowded beach neighborhood backstreet does, but they’re possible ~ and probable, if i’m driving ~ in either place.

for me a u-turn represents the freedom of responsibility ~ the choice, if you will ~ to return to where you’re meant to be or to catch something you almost missed. 

this week i heard about yet another family being torn in two by the ravages of an “amicable” divorce.

i know, i know ~ sometimes the damage already done is so devastating that there is no other solution, and maybe this was one of those ~ i don’t know that.  all the same, it has broken my heart.  

one thing is tragically certain ~ when the ripping is “finished” their precious children will be the biggest losers, the model of perseverence they’ll need for their turn, when it comes, shoved aside with a “they’ll adjust” to make room for “what i want” and “what i need”.

the same day i heard the lyrics to a song written by the newsboys that have lodged in my mind’s ear and loop there now pretty much 24/7. 

“this is not the warm-up round
this is not a trial heat
it can’t be repeated when your time has gone
this is not an infinite resource
or the prelude to a starter course
you don’t send it back if it gets done wrong

this is your life ~ treat yourself right
treat others right
live like you know you should
this is life ~ fight the good fight
fight for what’s right
do what you know you should

every living soul completes a finite number of heartbeats
this is not the sum of what you’re here for
every breath you take will be exhaled
every rising sun will fall
the measure of it all is what you live for

you had a dream ~
but it got lost in a life of regret
the devil knows you get just one shot

you had a dream ~
are you still dreaming or did you forget
that heaven’s calling for your best shot

this is your life ~ treat yourself right
treat others right
live like you know you should
this is life ~ fight the good fight
fight for what’s right
do what you know you should…”

those words are begging for a u-turn.  and i am, too.  now if only i was sitting close enough to the drivers to have a chance at being heard.

 

perseverence is a long walk

 
         mitch albom’s first book, tuesdays with morrie , had topped out the must-read charts back in 2002, wildly popular with just about everybody.  but i didn’t read it.  i knew i had plenty on my post-mastectomy emotional plate without having to ponder the bittersweet ending of that story.  oddly enough, my surgeon’s name was also morrie and almost every single appointment i had with him during those months was on a tuesday.  probably i just should have read the book, i spent so much time thinking about why i wasn’t going to read it.

    mitch’s second book came out just last month, and this time i was immediately drawn to have a little faith.  so last week  i picked up a copy to take with me to california.  and i couldn’t put it down.

     between the front and back covers three life stories ~ an inner city pastor, the lifelong family rabbi, and the author’s own ~ are loosely swirled together along an incredible faith marathon that left me wishing with all my heart i could have known a rabbi named albert lewis – “reb”.

in case you want to read it  i won’t give anything away, but near the end of the book the author asks you to think back over your own life to see who has faithfully pointed the way to God in a way that truly changed you. 

     my first thought was ‘goodness, there have been so many‘.  but a moment later the person whose name leapt up and hung suspended was my beloved grandma.  and when it did i dissolved into tears, missing until i ached the twinkle in her eye and the touch of her hand.  grandma left us to be with Jesus two years ago in june at the age of 101-1/2.

     for most of her life margaret cross was known as “marge”.  for all 51 years of my life she was simply “gram” to me.

     my earliest recollections of my grandma were watching her stand over her soup pot, apron tied behind her back, perpetually preparing some delicious something (or sometimes saurkraut ~ not so delicious to me) ahead of time  to have ready for whoever might gather around her lunch or supper table that day.

      her famous chocolate chip cookies grew overnight in that great round tin of hers, i just knew it.  i never saw her bake them but it was always, always full.  and the only time i ever saw gram sit down during the day was at her kitchen table, coffee cup in hand, munching on one of those cookies.  ” – ahh!” she’d sigh, contentedly, after every sip.  you know, it’s strange.  that tin sits in my own kitchen today and nothing ever grows in it anymore. 

     grandma’s house had huge cherry trees towering over her backyard, and there were plum trees, too, growing beside a meticulously tended vegetable garden.  but her pride and joy was the rose garden.  there was nothing in all the world my grandma loved more than “puttering” in her garden.  i suspect she and the Lord knew each other so well because they talked for so many hours out there every week while she pulled weeds and pruned wandering branches.  her pantry shelves bulged with row upon colorful row of peaches, pears, cherries, and the like, and if i ever ate fruit from a grocer’s tin can back then i can’t recall.

     as a little girl i don’t remember my grandma ever talking openly about the Lord.  i don’t remember her talking about much of anything, actually.  she mostly kept her thoughts to herself.  day in, day out, week in, week out, she was just there … quietly standing, stirring, canning, baking for grandpa and her family in the warm, cozy center of her house ~ her kitchen.  through the eyes of her granddaughter it was an idyllic way to live.

     i do remember her prayers.  when gram spoke to God her voice took on a low, hushed reverence and the words of thanks tumbled out from her heart to His like a lullaby.  then she would pause and nearly whisper “ahhh-men”, revealing the dear german heritage that is also half mine.

     i was in college the first time i actually remember sitting down to have a conversation with my grandma, just her and me.  one morning  just a few years before grandpa had dropped dead of a heart attack in their back yard ~ she’d looked out the back window to see him lying in the grass. when she called to tell us what had just happened gram’s voice sounded odd, but she never let on to me that anything was wrong.  i was sixteen.  we raced to their house where i marveled to watch a woman so divinely held with a deep abiding peace while the coroner carried her husband’s body around the house and away forever.  i’ve never forgotten that. 

     after i graduated and moved fifty miles north with my new husband i found myself carving an hour from more and more of my trips to seattle to knock on gram’s door and let her heat me up a bowl of her homemade soup for lunch.  she never tired of hearing what was new with me and i never, ever tired of the way time stood still around her table.

   but it wasn’t until she was beyond 95 years old (imagine that!) , her legs finally failing her, that i got to hear my grandma’s story from beginning to end.  and that’s when i discovered it wasn’t idyllic at all.  it had been hard.  hard on every level, and in all the private, unresolved corners of life i would never have suspected.

   but walking with God she had persevered.  she was bruised but not broken.  gracious but genuine, and honest, and sometimes the pain still smarted out loud.  but we talked, hour after hour, visit upon visit, about the faithfulness of her Savior – our Savior – and the grace and the strength she found in Him that she clung to, now more than ever, but just like always before.  and when she asked me to do the same, i said i would, and i did.  because i knew that between our visits together she was praying for me.  praying for all of us.

   then one morning it was time for the Lord to walk her home.  without any fanfare she closed her eyes and finished well.  my grandma’s legacy isn’t marked by any particularly impressive moments or events.  other than in her handwritten recipes and in the front of her Bible you won’t find her name or her memoirs.  gram was not eloquent.  in fact, she rarely even offered me advice or solutions when life turned sideways, but i never left her side without feeling a sense of reassurance that things would somehow work out alright.  gram lived over a century of trusting perseverence, and that’s impressive ~ faithfully pointing the way to God in a way that truly changed all of us.  changed me. 

     i wish you were still with us, gram.  i wish you could take my hand when life goes sideways and remind me without words that it will all work out.  that God will keep His strong hand on me and that the long faithful walk of perseverence is still worth it.  i’m so glad for the promise that i’ll see you again.

     thanks, mitch albom, for nudging my treasured memories into print.  and i think i’ll read your first book next. 

 

rantings from the realm of the decompartmentalized

as soon as we discovered the collection of remotes strewn around the living room we should have seen the classic battle brewing:  women vs. technology.  but we didn’t.

it was a simple enough mission, to begin with. after a busy day in the california desert we walked through the front door carrying our half-finished dq blizzards and the prospect of snuggling down in front of our two rented dvd’s.  we were confronted by one flat screen t.v., one audio receiver,  and one paper-thin dvd recorder.  ‘how complicated could this be?’  we foolishly thought.  no problem!  so we wrapped ourselves in cozy blankets (the air conditioning was working fine), assembled the three sets of controls (plus one “universal”), and pushed the logical button sequence to set up our first movie.

nothing happened.  so we pushed some more buttons.  still nothing.  was everything on?  yes.  everything plugged in?  yes.  next we started changing video sources – just a few times (maybe 12) – to find the hidden magic combination.  nothing, nothing, nothing.  we began turning things on and off in sequence, trying to convince the tall, dark, and handsome  television set to pay attention to us and light up with a picture.  but nothing.  well, almost nothing.  the audio receiver was playing a loud-and-clear intro to “the truman show” over and over and an annoying little box kept popping up on the dark t.v. screen to announce “weak or no signal”.  as if we hadn’t noticed!

after an aggravating hour and a half that saw each of the three of us politely “giving it a try”  amid a stack of owner’s manuals and a jumble of cord connections we looked at each other and agreed we would just leave it alone and head to bed.  let the record show, however, we were down, but not out.

the next morning i decided to short-circuit our frustration with a call to our gracious host, 12,000 miles away in southern peru.  surely he could rescue us.  instead, he admitted he’d had a heck of a time getting the system to work, himself, and promised to type out a set of instructions on his very next trip down.  i sincerely thanked him for that and wished him a good trip home.

my next call was from the mutual friend who’d set up the system and whose wife thought he probably knew it inside out.  now i’m not sure what his current hourly fee is but i’m pretty sure i can’t afford the 27 professional minutes he invested to educate and lead me through the maze of possibilities we had already tried multiple times. 

to his credit, his voice remained calm and i’m sure he didn’t mean to sound condescending.  and i’m sure he got weary of hearing, “yes, tried that.”  but everyone has their limit, and with a deep breath he finally reached his. “now listen, dianne,” he said, “i’m trying to help you, but you’re just not compartmentalizing here.  you’re just not thinking like a man.“  and i knew we had come to a friendly, if uneasy impasse.

stomping just a little we left the house to enjoy the sunshine for one more day.

that night i called on the last weapon in my arsenal and put out an all-points-bulletin on facebook to see who might come online and enlighten us.  my heartfelt thanks goes out to the three young men who answered my plea and tried, one by one through the miracle of the chat box, to solve our mystery.  but as the minutes ticked by each conversation halted at the same dead end with an admission of defeat that went like this:  “gosh, if i was there looking at it i could probably help you, but i’m not, sooo … good luck with that”.  and i knew we’d been licked when even my dear dad called at 10 p.m. after mom saw my facebook plea and worriedly told him to give me a call.

maybe i’ll tell you all about the truly great adventures of our trip the next time i sit down at the keyboard, but first i had to get this off my chest. 

for now let me just say the only reason that blasted television set is not sitting on the bottom of the pool is the fact that it is not mine.

and that if i had to choose, gentlemen, you can keep your compartments ~ i’ll stick with the wide open spaces in my brain, thank you kindly. 

 

gourmet meets the golden girls

some mornings i can only wake up shaking my head at what my subconscious has dreamed up overnight.

this morning i spent probably nannoseconds but what felt more like an eternitybetween 6 and 8 a.m. scrambling through an eye-popping, potentially catastrophic but wildly successful culinary extravaganza, where it seems on nothing more than a whim i found myself single-handedly debuting an open-air, multi-terraced, extraordinarily expensive gourmet restaurant overflowing with english gardens and huge bottles of wine and a who’s who of opening night patrons jostling for a table to be seen by the solid bank of long-lensed media types who were lined up along the fence.

never mind that i know absolutely nothing about the art of culinary mastery (though i am truly inspired by julie and julia), and even less about  the ecclectic ingenuity of the  nouveaux-riche restauranteur.

keep in mind that even a half glass of wine makes me dizzy, so beyond noticing that the something in a glass is red, white, or pink, a somalier i am not.

and dismiss the fact that my summer garden is usually comprised of hearty geraniums in faux terra cotta plastic patio tubs that are lucky to be watered by my lawn sprinkler.

now you can add two boistrous, melodramatic sixty-something, overly-bejeweled, fresh-from-the-hairdresser lady friends as the stars of my early morning comedy.  they couldn’t agree on anything and, as only they could, made this hilariously more and more obvious to the rest of us while they slugged down the iced-filled, half-gallon-sized wine glasses i had prepoured (!!!) and set out like water tumblers before we opened, hoping no one would notice.

i do have to say the roasted green and red peppers smothered in olive oil and minced garlic that i magically produced from somewhere behind the kitchen door looked delicious.  this is surprising, because as i took orders, hopping from table to table, i made up the menu as i went along, hoping someone back there would know how to prepare it.

and the next morning the paparazzi chased me down the street, desperately wanting an exclusive with the middle-aged mom who had become an overnight celebrity and whose name was now a household word.

now tell me, someone, what was all THAT about? 

 

introducing…

his name is jayden layne.

this morning, through the miracle of ultrasound, we counted his fingers and toes and ribs.
we traced his eyes and nose and the vertebrae down his spine.
we giggled as he wiggled.
we watched, mesmerized, the four pumping ventricles in his tiny, precious heart.
and when the technician looked up from the monitor with a smile to ask us what we thought we saw in that all-important spot on the screen
we all exclaimed, “it’s a BOY!!!” 
and jaimie and josh beamed at the goodness of God
to bless them with a firstborn son.
my grandson … i can’t wait for march 5 to come! 

 

woven, cut, and sewn together…

i don’t expect some of you to understand this, but despite being just a novice quilter i am a seasoned quilt appreciateur  and have frequented quaint little quilt shops for well over thirty years.  i can be drawn to pull open the front door for no other reason than letting my eyes wander over the soothing, luscious array of fabrics that always lines the walls inside.  and years before i ever picked up a rotary cutter (or knew what one was, for that matter) i’d usually walk out with a quarter or half yard of something i certainly didn’t need but simply couldn’t leave without.  (and no, this is not my personal collection – i wish!)

i have only visited a fabric mill once ~ it was pendleton, actually ~ to see the huge, automated shuttles fly and the miles and miles of yarns and threads transformed into breathtakingly beautiful plaids and stunning patterns.  i could hardly pull myself away that day, mesmerized by what was being created right before my eyes.

a bolt of fabric represents hours and hours of weaving someone’s delicious dream, even in a mill.  batik fabrics are works of art all by themselves, saturated with the jeweled blues and purples and greens of the sea or the flaming reds, oranges and yellows of a fiery desert sunrise.  magnificent.

so maybe you think i’d have trouble picking up that now-familiar rotary cutter with a goal to obliterate thirteen brilliant fabrics into scant strips of themselves.  all that careful, intentional effort someone invested to make them look just so.  i didn’t.

and maybe you think i’d have trouble sewing fabric strips side-by-side that i would otherwise declare horribly mismatched.  i didn’t.

i didn’t because i had a delicious dream, too ~ a picture in my head ~ of what my unlikely collection of strips would become when all of those incredible colors were forced to mesh into something that each of them were unable to be on their own.

and this time i got lucky.  my delicious dream is a reality on my dining room table.  but like i said, i’m a novice, and there is no guarantee my next endeavor will end as happily as this one.  i can hope for it, but i know i’m not that good.

i’m also a lover of analogy ~ of allegory ~ and i can’t help but think of my quilt as an analogy of my-life-as-a-collection-of-fabric, if you know what i mean.  you can spend a very long time weaving and creating something ~ a well-disciplined character quality, a lifelong relationship, a strongly-held opinion or position, a long-built career, a well-honed talent or skill ~ that to your eyes (if you do say so yourself) looks like a work of art all by itself.  why in the world would anyone want to mess with that?  why would anyone want to cut that up?

but Someone does.  Someone who has a perfect, delicious dream and knows exactly what it will take to create something beyond what we would otherwise want to preserve and hold onto, without the messing, thank you very much.  and without all the painful, necessary cutting up and piecing together.  and He knows what He’s doing.

He’s that good.

sometimes, when He cuts and pieces, i say “ofiddle”.  and sometime’s it’s “darn it!” or “why???”.  but in the end (darn it) i have to agree with what He does, finally, every single time.  and i have to admit that i like what He’s putting together, or at least i think i like His dream for me.

“hard as it seems
standing in dreams
where is the dreamer now
wonder if i
wanted to try
would i remember how
i don’t know the way to go from here
but i know that i have made my choice
and this is where i stand
until He moves me on
and i will listen to His voice

this is the faith
patience to wait
when there is nothing clear
nothing to see
still we believe
Jesus is very near
i can not imagine what will come
but i’ve already made my choice
and this is where i stand
until He moves me on
and i will listen to His voice.

Could it be that He is only waiting there to see
if I will learn to love the dreams that He has dreamed for me?

can’t imagine what the future holds
but i’ve already made my choice
and this is where i stand
until He moves me on
and i will listen to His voice.”
~ twila paris ~

when she was still with us i rarely visited my dear mom-in-law, janet, without finding my way to her upstairs loft to applaud whatever was currently on one of her great floor looms.  janet was known for painstakingly planning and carefully choosing what would become her precious woven fabric, and the end result was always nothing short of a treasure.

in my closet hang two vests, dear to my heart, that are constructed of janet’s hand-woven fabric.  i know they only exist today because she took courage and scissors one day to what she’d taken so long to weave, for the sake of a dream.

once i wasn’t sure i could do that.  now i know i can.  i need to.  and He needs to, too.

 

waiting, waiting …. waiting!

it’s officially fall.  and despite my youngest daughter standing now seven years beyond her last year of high school and despite having no direct connection to the public school calendar whatsoever, september still holds (and may always) a sense of new beginnings for me.  maybe it’s just an annual coincidence.  or maybe it’s a desperate subconscious need to inject hope and possibility into the days-getting-shorter that i dread every year.  or maybe we’re all forever bound to the september-june mentality that so many first days of school have carved deep into our family routines.

in any case, this september i find myself confronted with a smattering of not-yet-sharable-but-nonetheless-exciting-to-me new possibilities in at least three important corners of my life.  but right now they are only that ~ possibilities ~ and nothing more.  and on this otherwise glorious tuesday morning i am forced to acknowledge there is absolutely nothing i can do to turn any of them into anything more than that.  at this moment the doorknobs are on the other side to be opened to me by someone else’s hand.  for me there is simply a lot of waiting to be done.

i hate waiting.  and so i’m holding my breath.  just a little.  i’m not sure it will do anything beyond taking my mind off the waiting, but i guess even that counts for something.  

 

skies still blue

last wednesday morning i had the privilege of taking up my annual post at the stern line through the hiram m. chittenden locks on board the legacy, my parents’ 37 ft trawler.  it was time to begin yet another great adventure through the san juan and canadian gulf islands.  dad captained the wheel from the flying bridge and mom stood up on the bow.  and as if they somehow knew how important this launch would be, the locks crew actually reversed a closing gate as we approached and opened it wide again ~ something unprecedented in our experience ~ welcoming us in with smiles and every hand ready to reach out for one of our lines.

that the legacy was leaving the dock at all this summer is simply remarkable, and a dear “yes” to hundreds of prayers on behalf of my mom’s shattered kneecap and broken wrist.  i always knew my mom ~ and dad ~ were strong hearts, but the perseverence i witnessed between them this summer (at 76 and 80, mind you) is something i will never forget.  since so many of you have asked, two weeks ago tomorrow mom was released by her orthopedic surgeon, who couldn’t hide his surprise at how far ahead of schedule her knewly-knit bone fragments have meshed and healed.

so with that vote of confidence packed securely into their bags mom and dad dropped me off at the shilshole marina fuel dock and i waved them on their way, admittedly feeling a little like they probably did the afternoon i pulled away from home on my first solo drive.  no one could have been happier for them (or more envious) as they cruised off into the sound.

saturday afternoon mom called from roche harbor on san juan island where, as you might remember, we were once docked on the memorable day that saw neil armstrong take his first small step onto the lunar surface.  she called to tell me they were headed out to lime kiln on the west coast because  “i told dad i wanted to see some whales,” she said.

at one time working lime kilns really existed somewhere out there but today the exquisite strip of land called “lime kiln” is best known for winding paths along rocky cliffs and a charming little lighthouse looking out over a favorite orca summer playground.  

i haven’t heard from my free-spirited parents in a couple of days so i don’t know if the orcas showed up for their curtain call or not. but  it really matters not at this point, because if i close my eyes i can still see their sleek black and white forms rising and falling around the boat like nomadic islands and the startled wonder in jaimie’s eyes that no camera could ever hope to catch as a dorsal fin rose high above her head not ten feet from where she stood with her back to the rail.  and i can still feel the wild wind through my hair and the warm beams of sunlight falling on my cheeks as we churned through the salty afternoon air in hopes of finding the orcas at play.

it had been a long spring in 2001 and without meaning to the day represented a sweet victory in my heart.  i sat on the bow and thanked God for such a nearly perfect day, not knowing then how many more challenges the coming years would bring but so deeply, deeply grateful for a moment i knew i would need and could forevermore call up to remind myself of His great presence and love and faithfulness to me.

and as i sat i sang to myself what has since become one of my single favorite songs of all time, brought to my heart by point of grace.  it’s called “blue skies”…

on days of gray, when doubt clouds my view
it’s so hard to see past my fears.
my strength seems to fade and it’s all i can do
to hold on ’til the light reappears…
still, i believe
though some rain’s bound to fall
that You’re here, next to me
and You’re over it all ~

Lord the sky’s still blue
for my hope is in You
You’re my joy, You’re the dream that’s still alive
like the wind at my back and the sun on my face
You are Light, You’re grace
You are blue skies …. You’re my blue skies.

when nights are long – seems the dark has no end
still we walk on in the light of the truth
for waiting beyond, where the morning begins
is the dawn, and Your mercies are new!
oh, to believe we’re alive in Your love
there is so much to see
if we keep looking up!

Lord the sky’s still blue, for my hope is in You
You’re my joy, You’re the dream that’s still alive!
like the wind at my back, like the sun on my face
You are light, You’re grace
You are blue skies …. You’re my blue skies!

You fill the heavens with hope and a higher love ~
a picture, a promise for life….

mom and dad, i wish those blue sky moments for you, too, on this victory journey.  i love you both.