After a long dry spell

When it's been a long time, it can be hard to start again.

I navigate these waters in a boat I keep patching with that pizza man's help because he is always near me. I would be lost without him. Our children, mostly all grown up now, are making their way each their own and it can be hard to keep up with all the twists and turns and rough places.

But we keep patching and we keep paddling and we keep praying. God's grace stays right here with us and holds our patches fast and keeps loving us and giving us more and more grace for the moments that we try to turn around and extend outward to those who might need it at the time. Mostly, I think, it's me who needs it.

This will be our third son to wed. It will be a Sunday afternoon wedding near the end of a beautifully mild Florida November on a day that in the past has brought tears. We are hoping for the coming tears to be good ones.

Today was Thanksgiving Day. It was a confusing day for me, bizarre in its difference with our family gathering and meal postponed a day and all of this day spent cleaning and organizing and trying to make sense of personalities until I fell off to sleep in the afternoon in our big canopy bed. It was nearing dusk when the grandbaby arrived and attention turned to little feet pattering over wood floors and cookie-smudged face and babbled words for everything she sees. She sleeps now, among soft blankets on Pappaw's side of the bed until her mama and daddy come to scoop her up pigtails and all and take her home.

Tonight I am grateful, truly. I am grateful for a rusty but renewed ability to write, the unwordable comfort of being able to pray, and the love that patches all things together.