A Slight Shift.

It’s strange, I truly want to know my family now. Something has shifted within me that makes me want to hear their lives, their stories, their hopes and dreams. I want to hear, I want to learn now to love them. I’ve never really wanted this before, but now I wish I would have listened to grandma tell stories of childhood, grandpa tell stories of the war, and great grandma speak of life in the years of the Depression. But I didn’t care then. And now it’s too late. I can never get that time back, I can never resurrect those stories to life, to pass onto those I will meet. They were buried with my grandparents, lost in their minds. But I can learn from my mistake. I don’t want to waste any more time, using family vacations as times to catch up on reading. Books will always be, but time with my family is rare indeed, a newly treasured luxury. Its not always easy to listen with patience, to get over my own selfishness in order to hear and learn what I could never learn anywhere else.

Their words are like a painting, each phrase is a stroke on this giant mural of life, each thought a stitch in the quilt of history, something that can never be recreated even with all the other stories. Each is unique. Without one, the quilt is incomplete, the mural isn’t quite as neatly finished. But then again it’s never finished. It’s always being painted by the colors of our experiences. So I don’t want to lose them, I don’t want to lose them in the muddied waters I tread up with careless thoughts. I want to treasure each stroke, embracing it for what it is.

So let this adventure of beauty continue, just in a new venue. With the beautiful setting of the Appalachian Trail…Brother, Father, Sister, Mother. Give us eyes to see.