Eras

I grew up in a different era.  No cell phones,  no social media. We visited each other, talked on the phone, wrote letters, even sent cassette tapes of long family conversations when writing a letter just couldn't do enough.  

I can't count the number of times i went to stay with the grands, or aunts and uncles whether it was 30 minutes or a couple hours away. 

Like a soft rain on a dry, thirsty field in late summer, the snapshot memories of those times still refresh my soul.  I replay them often to revisit a simpler, more innocent season of my life. To visit the grands and smell her frying chicken and hot rolls in the oven,  or the sound his tractor made as it started up and the acrid diesel staining the dirt by the barn where he parked it. The quiet peacefulness of their house when i was bored out of my mind and nothing to do but listen to the birds chirping outside.  Or the escape of going to my aunts and uncles where cousins lived and we played outside til after dark and got into trouble for a myriad of childhood antics or got our mouths washed out with soap for saying some bad word that Aunt Shirley overheard.   

As i write this, the memories flood in as the sky opens up and begins to pour on that parched ground.

I hope my children have those later in their lives.  I believe they will, but with a different family. 

I was too young, and our married with children life began much later than my side of the family and we simply lived too far away from Tammy's side.  Regardless, they've made fond memories with our spiritual family, and i hope it's enough. 

My future hope is that they live close enough to us and one another that their children develop similar memories of experiences with us and their other grands, that or grandchildren will know my children as valuable assets in their development as aunts and uncles should. 

Our children are amazing people. Each of them.  They are going to make amazing adults.

I hope (and think they do) they see the eternal value of what we have here, that they remain as closely knit as they are and have been.   

There is a peace within them and between them that bonds them together,  it is a peace that doesn't come from this world... and I'm so thankful for that.   I have a feeling that they are going to need it. 

May Yahweh continue to bless them and keep them, make His face shine upon them and give them true Grace and true Peace all the days of their lives.

May Tammy and i live to see and invest our lives in our children's children. 

Blessed be the name of the Lord.