snippets

It is Sunday, a definite coffee day..
The message this morning...the frozen landscape...lunch prepared after church and laid out on the kitchen counter...went out for a movie at Ragtag this afternoon, La Danse...scenes from Paris..

Paris was my father's favorite city. He liked San Francisco also. San Francisco and New Orleans were my mother's mother (grandmother to me) favorite cities..she also liked visiting the Cayman Islands or St. Thomas at Christmas. I have not ever been to Hawaii but have adopted a habit of travelling to the Caribbean for Christmas (with my children), if possible, and driving to New Orleans every chance I get. My nephew's wife is from NOLA. They were married on a plantation outside of the city, a late afternoon wedding, we all departed before sunset, the time when the mosquitoes descend and make being outside unbearable.
My younger brother took his wife and their two older children to London and Paris for her birthday this past year. He gave the kids cameras and they took many, many pictures. This was something I used to do with my children when travelling, a way of getting the children's perspectives and now I have boxes of photographs, pictures, sitting in the large main floor office, ready and waiting. Once the weather is again warm those pictures will be scrap-booked.
Paris was the last trip my father and mother took before he died. He was often in a wheelchair, an oxygen tank attached. He lived life until the end.
My older brother's four children from his first marriage live in London, go to Paris, it is only a trainride across the tunnel.
The London to Paris train broke down this past week and was sitting in the tunnel for two hours. All things man-made fail...something I iterated to my ex-husband once when we were camping down at Johnson's Shut-ins, walking around the large "dam" that sits above the shut-ins..he said it would never fail. Never say never. And him, with a background in engineering. The thing failed in a year during the off-season, flooding the campground.
An ex-boyfriend of mine had not been camping, did not know how to pitch a tent, but had numerous other manly qualities and was absolutely wonderful. The only man I have loved these past eighteen years and after nine months he told me he did not want a relationship..ergo, the "hiatus" I had requested..and gone was his pontificating, gone were his quotes, his good character, gone were the daily conversations and everything him..I cried. But it passed and I became a better person because of it...it took a long while for me to become better and it is still a work in progress which includes the dailiness of prayer, the dailiness of giving over, the dailiness of reading God's word, the dailiness of listening...but not paying very good attention sometimes..but getting better...and learning to trust and knowing that God is God and His ways are higher than my ways..
And again:
Sitting in church today. Doodling. Thoughts wandered, strayed, then laughter from the congregation, something funny..but me, thinking about New Orleans, thinking about NOLA, thinking, will I always be single and does it really matter.. And walking out, after church. "Bonjour Matthew" (my friend Shelley's husband).."bonjour, ca va?".."ca va bien, merci, merci.." yes, mercy, mercy..I love french..maybe one day I'll move to France and marry a french farmer. I hear they are very good looking, but do they have character...


"Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.." Ecclesiastes 31:30..