As a starry-eyed teenager, I loved the song, “Young Love,” as sung by Sonny James on a record album we had in our home when I was when I was growing up. Some years ago, I came across another song, sung by Sonny James. It is beautiful in a different way. Not about young love, but at the other end of the spectrum… mature love, filled with memories and appreciation of all the shared years. When I found the song,…
THE NIGHT IN QUESTION Saturday, December 12, 2009. THE FACTS A young man worked his full shift at Independent grocery store, finishing at 11:30 pm. He He left town for a drive in the country, as was his usual practice, to go for a short drive to unwind before going home. The air very cold and crisp, but clear, in town. He did not know about the patches of heavy, thick ice fog here and there along the route he…
Toddlers, Teens, and the Twilight Years What do they have in common? To name a few…They can do things they have never done before, or can’t do things they’ve always done before.They are misunderstood by those around them.They don’t understand themselves or what is happening to them TODDLERS We had seven children, but we never experienced the “terrible two’s”. One evening at supper, fourteen-month-old James began smashing his mashed potatoes with his spoon, splattering them all around. I thought he…
JUNE 5, 1976. June 5 has been a special day for me in more than one way through the years. The first was 46 years ago today. Very few people who know me today will recognize the handsome young man in this picture, but he was a significant part of my life, and helped shape who I am today. This is my first husband, Bob Langdon, on our wedding day – June 5, 1976. Our marriage lasted only two years,…
Valentine’s Day fell on a Sunday in 1982, and Friday night was inconvenient for family travelling from far away. So we were married on Saturday, February 13. Yesterday would have been our 40th anniversary. We were married 37 years when he was called Home almost three years ago. It is that last anniversary I cherish the most, although at the time neither of us knew it would be our last. We didn’t celebrate on the 13th that year, but waited…
There are gifts… and then there are gifts. Our family stopped giving gifts at Christmas more than twenty-five years ago, for reasons I won’t get into here. But there are precious gifts given by friends and loved ones that are not tied to any particular date in the year. A few months ago, I shared with you a gift my husband gave me for no special reason. I refer to the composite picture he made of my father and me,…
James 4:13-14 NKJV Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. We don’t always have tomorrow. This struck home for our family one unforgettable night; a night that changed our family…
It was the fall of 1960. My father had recently died, and we had moved to an old, decrepit apartment building downtown. Our city cousins were coming to visit, and we were unruly in our excitement. With only an hour before the visit, Mom sent us kids off to Remembrance Park to play. “But don’t go near the bog, or you’ll get stuck in the quicksand!” Mom warned. Remembrance Park was a marvellous little place, with an arched log bridge…
This week is Christian Life Week at Prairie Bible College, and beginning tomorrow, it is also an Alumni Reunion for those of us whose final year there was in 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, or 2001. I am in the middle – the Class of ’81. When I attended, it was called Fall Conference at Prairie Bible Institute. Pictured above is me, age 25, a freshman, and very recently widowed. My first husband, Bob, had died eight weeks earlier, in July….
We haven’t had many mosquitoes this year, but we’ve seen a lot of hornets! Hornets are quite the little opportunists, as I discovered when we lived out in the country on an acreage. All summer long the hornets monopolized our hummingbird feeders, chasing the tiny birds away. The hummingbirds migrated south at the beginning of September, and we left the feeders out for a while longer. The hornets loved that. We would find their nests everywhere. One year we were…