A New Chapter of Life

 

A Most Unusual Memorial Day

            “To every thing there is a season.”  I was so excited in 1973 when we moved into our new home. We had it built to our specifications and were ready for our new chapter of life, living in Country Village.  We had only one child, age three, at that time.  Life was good and new neighbors were friendly. The years brought another baby boy and twenty years of Young Life meetings in our new home.  Church friends and prayer meetings filled our living area.  I loved cooking and they loved eating here and praying. 

            Teens hung out in our garage and played pool and stayed all night.  Those same teens appeared at Delta High School in my English classes.  Hours of planning and grading papers took up many evenings.  Weekends were filled with soccer, wrestling, football and tennis games as we watched our sons compete.  Holiday meals and celebrations filled every corner of our home and remodeling projects continued through 2010. 

            We love our house, and the endless borders of gardens around our lawn.  But, the season is over.  With a beginning prayer, meditation, discussions for a week, and a continued confirmation that God wanted us to move, I biked over to a stranger’s home around the corner.  A friend at lunch told me this family was renting and looking for a house in Country Village. I appeared at their door , introduced myself, and said, “ I  think you need to see our house.”  They had three real estate visits that evening , but said they could come to our house on Friday.  They loved our house, confirmed on Sat. they wanted it , and bought it on Memorial Day.   

            Now, I am rejoicing that I can live in the same town with my granddaughters, and stay longer in Englewood, Fla. during the winter. My sister sold her house the same week and for the first time in over sixty years, we can live near each other and paint together.
      It is bittersweet rejoicing because I am leaving my neighbors of forty years.  We have shared joys and losses together.  We helped raise each other’s children.  My best friend and I have walked the Country Village circle hundreds and hundreds of times discussing our lives and our children’s lives.   We know every tree, house, and crack in the streets.  However, everything has a season and my time in Muncie is over.  I am sad to leave good friends, Commonway, my church, my writer’s groups, my art friends, and the countless number of students I have taught and watched grow and have families of their own. 

            Denny and I begin a new chapter in our retirement.  I am sorting, purging and selling household items.  I want to travel light in these next years.  I have so many things for sale: arts and crafts, dishes, furniture, linens, and antiques.  I will be posting soon about sale opportunities. 

            However, my facebook friends come with me wherever I roam.  For that I am grateful. By blog will help me stay in touch with my friends and followers.  My heart will always remain in Muncie because this town has given me many close friends and opportunities.  At the end of July we will move.  I suspect my blog may be a little neglected these next couple of months,  but I will continue it when we get settled in Fort Wayne. Thank you, Muncie for all your love.

Finding Silence

Finding Silence

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  Thoreau

                  We all must feel this urge at sometime in our life.  We want to be alone with the water, the mountains, the land, and God.  We don’t want to be interrupted
with phone calls, responsibilities of cleaning, working, cooking, or other daily demands.  We want silence. No phones, no “mom” can you help me, no pleas to cook for a church dinner or fold bulletins.  We are weary of work and our coworkers. We want to be alone.

            We have illusions of living in a cabin in the woods and discovering what life really is.  Just as Thoreau sought his answer to what life really is, we all search for it.  Yet, our years come to an end, and we have lived life without this “aloneness”. We are too busy living.  It is a catch 22 conundrum.  No time to be still.

            Perhaps we could bottle up the early hours of quiet .  We could seal them tightly so the silence would not escape and open it only when our mind felt like it was exploding.  We could carry the bottle and open it when the grandkids are screaming in the car.  Better yet, we could pop the silence cork when friends are negative or hurtful or the world news is too depressing to digest. 

            We must drink life out of our own glass and guzzle or sip.   We live on this earth on a need to know basis.  Amidst the crises, we need immediate answers and to know how to find silence, peace, or divine direction right in our own backyard or back room. This silence and searching must be discovered by our own design.  It is essential to our quality of living.  We must ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, to show us His path for our lives. In this silence, His leading will be evident.  But, as we leave the quietness, will we follow His directions, His recommendations?  With silence come answers and responsibilities.  

       Are we ready to go into the woods, the backyard, or the porch and seek silence? Perhaps we are too busy walking, running, worrying.  We must learn there is no set path for us to study; instead, as we walk we make our own path of discovering who we are and what is our purpose.