“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Photo taken in Killarney, Ireland. (Killarney National Park with Ross Castle in the distance)
Foto Friday #37
Most stairs won’t take you
where faith has wings to lift you:
over any wall
Photo taken at Clonmacnoise Monastic Site, Ireland
“It Just Took a While,” she said . . .
My latest hospice patient was full of stories. Millie started telling me stories the minute I sat down beside her. She grew up on a farm with three sisters, so there were numerous tales of chores, animals, strict parents, and of course boyfriends. The boys would come calling on her sisters, not her. She watched as her sisters dated and eventually married, but she was always more comfortable on her own. “I was sure I’d be an old maid”, she admitted, “It’s what I thought I wanted”… and then she met him.
Andy had returned from a two-year enlistment in the Navy. Back home with his parents in Pennsylvania, he felt lost and didn’t know what to do with his life. His uncle was a farmer in Kansas who needed help with the harvest, so he moved west. Andy and Millie met when they each drove truck-loads of wheat to the grain elevators in the middle of a long, hot summer.
Millie is proof that there’s always space inside us reserved for someone else and a new way of thinking. She had to adjust her heart and her mind to make room for Andy and for the family they might have someday. “It just took a while”, she said, but once she figured out love had finally come calling on HER, she changed her thinking from “me” to “us”. The life journal I wrote for Millie will be shared with 3 children, 6 great-grandchildren and 14 great-great grandchildren.
A Poem for Millie
Once
she lived inside herself
closed off to the world of affection.
Then
there was a tug at her heart
and a sense of approaching vulnerability.
She felt herself being opened somehow
and she
never found her way back to being closed.
Photo Credit: Pinterest
Note: Names have been changed
See my other Hospice Stories Here
Foto Friday #36
Yes, I realize this week’s photo challenge is “Ducks in a Row”, but this is not a duck dog – it’s a sheep dog, and I think he is doing an admirable job of getting his “sheep” in a row! 🙂
for Nancy Merrill Photography A Photo A Week Challenge: Getting Your Ducks in a Row
Photo taken in the Highlands of Scotland
Foto Friday #35
Out for a walk and what do I see?
This little face staring up at me!
The Eve of Spring
On the eve of Spring,
the earth is a dirty place!
A rowdy Fall seems to have
flung things here and there
and Winter stubbornly refused
to pick them up.
The result is a sad chaos
of decaying leaves, abandoned nests
and an impressive assortment of litter
from some drunken teenage party.
Twigs and broken branches
are strewn like tiny corpses
on the ground.
Emerging from the dead,
Spring instinctively will come
bringing with it
an elixir of cleansing rain.
Following the purge,
rejuvenation is conceived.
Every long-forgotten seed
soon starts to grow, and the
landscape will change
before our eyes.
But for now, trees bend
like little old men,
crippled by harsh winds
and the burden of snow.
From their stooped position,
they lift their weathered faces
toward the sun – as we all do,
on the eve of Spring.
Foto Friday #34
I grew up a country girl, so the hustle and bustle of a big city rarely appeals to me, but there is something about the freeways, waterways and railways in this photo of Glasgow, Scotland that make for an interesting picture. If the train (with its bright blue cars that match the water) had not been passing at the exact moment I snapped the photo, I suspect it would have been just another ordinary cityscape.
Photo taken from hotel room at Jurys Inn in Glasgow.
for Nancy Merrill Photography A Photo A Week Challenge: Cityscapes
