OK, I can't separate them, so here goes -
I arrived safely back in Salem on March 13th after a great visit in Memphis. A spot was waiting for me at Salem Village Mobile Home Park, where I've stayed each time I've been in Salem. Chris and Mark always have a nice spot for my Airstream and welcome me back like family. I stayed until May 21st when I left for D.C. for the wedding of Mary Ann's niece, Beth.
I caught up with my Church "family", spending time with the Milan family, seeing all my little ones at Church, including several no longer Little Ones who were home from college for Spring Break.
It seems I'm an intrepid world traveler - for about three months. Then I must return HOME for re-charging. And I discovered that BEFORE God surprised me with a whole new reason to return to Salem.
In my Nov 13, 2007 blog I talked about Carol Wheeler and her two children, Emily and Andrew. We became very close, very quickly when I called to offer to take the kids off her hands for a few hours.
I said in that blog, "They've found a place in my heart that feels like I have a new family."
I had no idea when I wrote that just how prophetic it was.
Carol and I have fallen in love and I really do have a new family. We spent most of the time I was in Salem together.
To use a phrase of Carol's, "We just 'fit' together." Another of Carol's thoughts, "We can talk without an 'edit button'".
And talk, we do, for hours, OK OK - anyone who knows me is not surprised that I talk for hours - but I said, "WE" can talk for hours! Many times we complete each other's sentences, or say something simultaneously, or laugh at a thought that was two or three steps removed from a comment and we got there at the same time, through the same sequence of thoughts. We are so comfortable together it's hard to believe we've really only gotten to know each other in the last few months.
I've struggled to understand all of this, much less explain it, which is why I haven't posted.
Then Beth's Wedding vows provided this poem by Pablo Neruda,
"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close."
Life is so good
and just keeps getting better.
