A time to help and be helped ...

... How much sweeter life is when we become a family, by blood as well as by choice.

On Sunday, I learned that a Woman in our church whom I know, was having an emotional breakdown. I went over there with a neighbor and we just let Her talk and cry. She is a single Mother, dealing with the typical challenges of that situation, as well as physical and emotional issues. How my heart ached for Her loneliness and sorrow, so unnecessary! How for the 100th time I wanted to hunt down the man who left Her and rearrange his face. How I wondered why a good, solid, strong man has not yet found his way into Her life.

We agreed that my Beloved and I will come back and spend some time with Her this week, just being friends and helping Her get a few things organized. It is very important that I involve my Beloved, that I help "Jane" to have some Female friends to lean on. A man's natural desire to comfort, can go the wrong way in even the best-intentioned of souls and I would be a fool to think that I am immune.

When I came home, I discovered that some of our family had dropped by and filled our refrigerator up with food. In these hard times, how we needed that!

Sis in Law to marry

Such wonderful news!

Alone for so long, now to be married.

When I first met Her, my future Sister-in-law was a very unhappy Woman. Anyone could see that She was beautiful, though She battled a weight problem. As I got to know Her, I became quite aware that though She had the famous temper common to the Ladies of Her family (surprising, fierce and sudden, like a summer storm), She also had Their great big, golden hearts.

She was alone.

She of course was an enthusiastic part of Her Sister's wedding to me, but it had to have hurt, to go home alone that night.

Now we have met the wonderful man from the Bahamas, who has captured Her heart and She, his.

In delightful Caribbean fashion, the family patriarch will be forever-more addressed as "Dohd," as opposed to "Dad." We will learn a new culture as we bring this beautiful man into our Southern-fried family.

And we will celebrate that two have become one, now and forever.

Dread

The day will come, when I make my every-other-year flight home to see Mom and Dad, when the silver streaks now in their hair will have become monochrome.

The day will come when their strength will be gone.

The day will come when I have to say goodbye.

Yes, it's a very depressing thought, but I believe it is normal for someone my age, first as an unpleasant whisper of possibility when I was a child, then more and more insistent with each passing year, today almost unbearably loud within my soul.

We all feel a little wistful sadness when a little one outgrows babyhood, and when the cute preteen becomes a gangly and independence-seeking adolescent, and when the adolescent moves away from home. But we also feel joy in each of those moments, for it represents maturation, progress, not decline.

I feel no joy in reminders of mortality writ upon the faces of the parents that I love.