memories — New Blog — Under The Flyover Sky

This porch. It has been here my entire life. It has offered shade in the balmy southern summers, a place to shelter from the rain, a perch to listen to family laughing and watching them play. This porch can be slicker than ice when wet, cozy when dry, the steps the perfect height for jumping into a pile of leaves and its a miracle that no one has ever been impaled by the wrought iron fencing! Its weathered a lot in its 60+ years of existence and even once survived a fire. It has been a constant as the world changed around me. A place to return to. Roots. It is a gift each time I sit here. It is a gift because I know too well, statistically speaking, that time is no longer on our side. Stats aside, I’m not naive enough to believe it couldn’t be me that brings this relationship to an end. Life is stolen from the young and young at heart alike.

I had the gift to sit here again over the holidays. To smell the lingering aroma of oak from neighboring fireplaces, watch the sun sink in the west while listening to my young family’s laughs from the yard and watch them delight in their time here, just like me when I was young. The memories past and being made before my very eyes are a gift. There was a season when I was young, like many, that I was enamored with gifts under the tree this time of year. I marvel today how experience changes perspective and now the greatest gifts aren’t found under the twinkling lights but are happening here in front of me. Time is a gift indeed and something to not take for granted.

This holiday season is quickly coming to an end and a decade is over in a matter of hours. I pray that days in 2020 and beyond will be time well spent and memories are ones we will learn, cherish and grow from. I hope that we notice the gifts around us that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. May we keep perspective during the daily grind and notice the little things around us while finding joy in this crazy world.

Best wishes to you and yours in this new decade! Thanks for following along!

Laying in my bed, all feels right with the world.

Truth be told, its not actually “my” bed, but the one I use when I visit my grandparents. The one that I have used almost every visit my entire life. The bed that is next to the one my brother slept in when we were kids but is now occupied by my two children. This is the house my father and his brothers grew up in. The only place I’ve known my grandparents to live. The house with the large yard with the tall trees, a novelty for a girl who spent all but her first four years of life on the prairie. The house with the hallway that ended with the linen and toy closet, that to my little kid self, felt at least 20 yards long. The house across the pond that must have a million frogs that sing you to sleep each night while the hum of the big trucks on the nearby highway add their own notes to the song. The house that has the sweet smell, like only a place does, that is in a humid environment. The house that is bursting with memories. This is what I have known, always known, a source of peace when my adult reality is a constant state of change.

While this house, this family, hasn’t been without its set of challenges, I’m thankful for the gift of time and the stability it has provided on this side of eternity. I know how fortunate we have been. Purely from a numbers game, time is no longer on our side. But was it ever? I’m no longer naive enough to think that the time clock runs out only for those advanced in their years. I know each moment we’re given can’t be taken for granted.

But for this moment, I push all that aside. I’ll savor the sound of my sweet babes as their breath falls heavy as they sleep. I’m thankful that they too can make memories in this house and experience the love of the people in it. I’ll soak up the scent of this room and store it away in my mind. And I’ll let frogs and trucks serenade me to sleep just like they have done for 30+ summers. I’ll drift off with thankfulness in my heart that once again, we were given the gift of time to bottle up another round of summer memories, in this house, with these people.

The peaceful sounds of night from the porch of my grandparent’s house.