She Let Me Know I Was Loved

    Yesterday I went to my grandma's bench. She has been gone a while now but my grandpa put up a bench in her memory. Every time I go there I am struck with the perfection of the location. It is in a little grove of trees along a tree lined path. On one side through the trees there is a horse farm and on the other side open field. There is also a sort of creek. Mountains guard the distance and her bench always has something on it or beside it that to me exudes her. Yesterday there were acorn caps and beautiful leaves on  her bench and all around it. I walked along the path and could hear little birds singing and the horses snorting to each other. The rain fell and the mist cloaked the mountains. All of this held the peace I needed to feel.

  I hope that my grandma is in a far more beautiful place living a life she probably never allowed herself to imagine. As a woman who weathered a war and the great depression and many other defining moments for the world she kept on. She lived a life of all sorts of challenges. I only knew her however in her later years and I believe I was blessed with some of the best of her. She had wisdom, had learned what to battle, had learned what to value, had learned where to put her energy in the time she had, and it blessed me. It took her a lot of years and a lot of heart break to get there. It took a lot of letting go, a lot of mistakes, a lot of tears, it took a lot of having to put herself aside to let others shine and it took doing this over and over and over. It never stopped. Her very last years of life were not glamorous. She was the last of her siblings and family to pass away. She had health issues and her body was tired. The last time I saw her she was quite sick however she was able to let me know she wanted her hair brushed, and I brushed it, and I held up some Daffodils for her to enjoy, and in her suffering she let me know, as always, that I was loved. We all need that so deeply.

  I hope you feel loved today ~
Tansy