~when you finally get the message~

"It occurred to me that rather than looking down yesterday that I should look up instead.  I had my camera in hand and was just getting ready to take a photo of the San Juan Mountains over in the distance.  They were glistening in the mid day sunshine, still covered a bit by leftover late winter snow and I thought it would make a great shot.  Yet something told me that the sight above me would be much more beautiful.  So from the seat of the Adirondack chair I was resting in as I enjoyed the shade provided under an old Cottonwood tree in our yard, I aimed upward with my camera and I loved the image that I was able to capture. Sometimes it would seem that we miss some of the very best of things life has to offer us simply because we aren't looking in the right places to begin with."

 the view of the Colorado sky yesterday


Good morning friends and family out there and greetings from here along the Western Slopes.  It's so very hard to imagine that tomorrow marks the last day of the month of June and that only means one thing.  This summer is flying by us at a rate hard to even imagine and the older I get, the more so it is apparent to me.  Somewhere out there, "the 18" are hopefully enjoying a vacation away from school as they do the fun stuff that all kids like to do.  Also somewhere out there are a group of new people, perhaps they shall be called "the 22" or something.  My new first graders, kids that I am STILL taller than, are having fun too.  Perhaps they  are wondering what it will be like to meet their new teacher, a lady named Mrs. Renfro, come this August.  I equally wonder about what it will be like to meet them.  My heart sings when I think of it and in as much as I usually love summertime, I will be happy to find them and the sooner the better :)

As summers go, this one is worlds better than last summer was.  For that I am so very grateful.  The days of longing for returning to life in Kansas and of being homesick and lonely and just about any other sad feeling you can imagine are gone.  Thank the good Lord above.  Yet even having said that, this summer has been a most stressful and trying one here, with way too many proverbial "irons in the fire".  I know better than to do that but I do it anyways.  I've surely decided that having two different properties in two different states, houses that are 611 miles away from one another, is not a good plan.  We've made countless trips back and forth to Hutch getting things cleaned up and ready for someone to call my old house their new home.  Each of those trips kind of begin to take their toll on a person but we soon will be done.  Now to just find the right person to live there is about all we have left to do.  When I look at the big picture, it sometimes seems overwhelming to me and so I've narrowed down my focus during each of the trips back home.  Cleaning out belongings, tidying up everything and getting my mindset ready for giving up that dear old house on 14th Street had to come first.  Finally at long last, we are ready to get it rented by August.  I need to remember, especially when I feel so overwhelmed by all of the decisions to be made, that someone out there is waiting to move into that house.  God has a plan for someone very special to live there and although I would have rather had it rented out and occupied by the first of June, the right person wasn't ready for it yet.  I sure hadn't been looking at it that way until just a few days back but now that I see it differently, everything makes a lot more sense.  To whoever that "someone" will end up being, they are getting a nice to place to live, in a town that I called home for so many years.  If God has chosen to them to live there, then they must be really nice people.  I'll let you know when we find one another :)

Last week, for the first time since I moved to the Western Slopes last summer, I became ill.  At first it was laryngitis which quickly turned to bronchitis.  I ignored it, just like I always do, because I hate being sick and going to the doctor.  I'm ____________________ (insert any lame brained excuse you wish into that blank) to go to the doctor.  Friday night presented a different story.  I awoke from my sleep with a sharp pain in my chest and when the pain wouldn't magically disappear, I started to get a little bit on the worried side.  I woke Mike up and said that I wanted to go to the ER here and so off we went.  It didn't take long for the doctor on call to figure out that I was very dehydrated (a bag of IV fluids helped me out) and that I also had pleurisy to add to the "I finally got sick" mix.  Percocet for the pain and a Z-pac for an antibiotic to kill the bug that was ailing me have helped me feel much better.  But I finally got the message from God above when I got one of His "whacks upside the head" that told me how foolish it was to get sicker as each day went by without going to see what was the matter.  Every once in a while, He does that to me, you know?  He sends me the message that I really don't need to be quite as busy as I think I do.  That slowing down a bit and resting wouldn't hurt me a bit.  Life will go on whether I have my hands in everything or not.  As I was lying there on that bed in the ER, drifting in and out of "Percocet land", I realized that I'd been way too busy and not only was I burning the candle at both ends, I was meeting it in the middle as well.  I promise to try and do better.

The afternoon is soon to arrive and I just got asked out on a date with this guy I know here named Mike Renfro.  He wants to go bowling and since I've really no good excuse NOT to go, I said "yes".  Of course, he will more than likely beat me every single game but really it's fun to try.  I haven't been bowling since last summer so before I totally forget how to throw the ball hard enough to get at least a strike or two, I guess I'd better get my shoes on and head over to Montrose's "Rose Bowl" and show up :)  Whatever you are doing this day, may you be at peace as you do it my friends.  I think of you guys, each of you, all of you every day.  I wonder if you are ok and if life is going all right for you.  Dear friends and family back home in Kansas, Mike and I will see you this next weekend upcoming.  Even though our trips back there have been fast and furious, sooner or later the house will get rented and things will settle down a bit.  I just know everything is going to work out.  I tend to forget the message sometimes that the "Good Book" admonishes us to remember and the message is to trust that God is going to work everything out for the good of all involved in it.  It works every time, if you only let it.




Me, last summer, just posing with the little kids' helper dinosaur.  I never needed it as I did horrible enough on my own :)
 

~Norman's weekly update, upon realizing that we can all do something~

In early January of 2013, I left my home in south central Kansas after school one day and headed to southwestern Colorado to visit this guy named "Mike Renfro".  We had gone to the same high school back in the little town of Haven, Kansas and had reconnected with one another on the social media site of Facebook.  I had never driven to Colorado on my own before, let alone 611 miles that would take me deep into the Rocky Mountains and over Monarch Pass before I would reach where he lived.  I nearly did it in one fell swoop but realized how crazy that was when my eyelids would not stay open near the Colorado town of Salida.  About midnight I stopped driving, found a place to stay for the night and then got up the next morning early to make the trip over the summit of the pass at Monarch.  Sure enough a couple of hours later, I found him standing in the driveway of the old farmhouse that he was living in and the rest......  well as they say, "the rest is history".

At the Black Canyon of the Gunnison that very first day we met again on a Saturday afternoon.  The skies were a beautiful shade of blue, the sun was shining and the temperatures were surprisingly warm for a winter day in Colorado.  That "chance" meeting (which was not by chance anyways) on the pages of Facebook brought me to a place that I had never seen before, shoot really never knew that it existed.  In the year and a half that has passed since I first came to Colorado, much has happened to me in my life here with my now "husband" Mike.  I've met so many new people and become friends with some of the dearest of folks whose name is written in the clay filled soil of Colorado. Two weeks back now, Mike and I made friends with a man whose name is written in the soil of the state of Pennsylvania, Norman Horn.  We met him on the road, as we came upon  him about half an hour from our home in Montrose when we headed back east to Kansas for a few days.  He was pushing a cart filled with supplies and the sign on the front of it pronounced his mission to "Fight childhood cancer-FTK"   If you are interested in learning more about Norm and his over 3,000 mile journey by foot across America, please visit his website  www.coast2coastFTK.com and read his story.  The following is a weekly "Norman update".

From the moment I saw my husband Mike get out of our car that evening, rustling through the supplies of snacks we had brought for the road trip back to Hutchinson, and hand this newly found stranger on the roadway a box of our granola bars, my heart was deeply touched.  That simple act, the gift of sustenance from the hands of one man into another, helped me to realize that there are way more people in this world of ours than just ourselves.  I always thought I knew that, you know?  But evidently I needed this reminder in the early evening hours along Highway 50 just outside of the turnoff for Morrow Point.  After a short five minute conversation of introductions and promises to meet him in 3 days back in Gunnison for dinner, we drove away and were strangers no more.  Mike and I became friends that night with him and we have watched with much interest his progress since then.

One thing I have learned in the past two weeks is the opportunity that Norm's cross country hike has provided for what I refer to as the "common man's" ability to help provide support for a worthy cause.  Mike handed off a box of granola bars that he had just purchased from supplies found on the shelves of City Market that evening.  Norman had found a brown bag along the roadway, just prior to our meeting him, that was marked on the outside especially for him.  Inside of it was a bottle of drink, a granola bar, and a $5 bill.  Later on down the road after we left him, he would encounter a man who would share his catch of fish for the day with Norman over a campfire.  In Gunnison he found a man who helped him fix the front wheel of his heavily laden cart.  So much goodness shown to him and that was just in a span of the 60 miles it takes to get from Montrose to Gunnison.  Folks like you and I, just ordinary people by anyone's standards, have opened up their homes to him for the night to rest or set an extra place for him at their supper tables.  People have passed bottles of water off to him, smiled and stopped to say hello, gave him their thanks, and countless other acts of human kindness.  And the not so strange thing is this; they did this all, not for what they could get out of it but rather, they did it because they knew it was the right thing to do.  I like that about people, a lot.

I thought about Norman during the day that we knew he would be crossing over Monarch Pass and I have to admit the "mother" in me worried about his progress along the way.  From our home here in the valley, I could see that there were lots of clouds and probably wind that might be pushing him along the way.  I know how treacherous it can be just to cross it in a car in the dead of winter.  We knew he would make it but a person couldn't help but to wonder how things were going.  It was good news to see the photos that he posted from high atop the pass, a place I have seen way more times than I care to mention, (ok, ok about 15 in all) since I came out here that first January weekend in 2013.  The trip down would be way better than the trip up it and so we were sure he could make it to Salida, no sweat!  And he did.  Not only did he make it to Salida, he also made it through the canyon lands that would lie ahead before reaching Canon City.  From Canon City, Norm trudged onwards to the beautiful city of Pueblo where he rested for the night before leaving to visit Denver for a fundraiser there for his cause.  Come Saturday morning, this weekend upcoming, he will start out once again from Pueblo heading east towards the state of my birth, Kansas. 

To all of the people out there who have helped Norman along the way, from his first step of the hike in San Francisco, California to the last step he will take in Atlantic City, New Jersey we offer our sincere thanks.  You might not think that the gift of a "lowly" bottle of water would be enough but just offer it to a hiker like Norman and you'll find it worth aplenty.  To those people who will provide him a meal to eat and a nice warm bed to sleep in for the night, I thank you for your hospitality.  For the "hellos", the wave of a hand in greeting as you pass by him along the road to the east I am sure than Norman is beholden to you.  For the least of things and for the greatest as well, all are much needed and certainly most appreciated. 

I know the stretch of road Norman will be walking come this next weekend like the proverbial "back of my hand".  Once he crosses over into Kansas, sometime in the next couple of weeks, he will find things a whole lot more flat.  The farms and small towns that dot the roadway from the border at Coolidge all the way to my old home in Hutchinson, clear to the Kansas City area are filled with the greatest of people.  They are called Kansans.  Friends and family back there who are reading this, I want to thank you in advance because I just know that some of you will see him and stop to say hello.  Please take good care of him along the way, will you?  Pray for his safety, shake his hand in friendship, bring a bottle of water and a snack if you see him on the highway, or open up your home to him for the night.  It doesn't matter how small or how large you would deem your offering.  Anything that you could do to help his cause will be accepted with deep gratitude by him.  The letters "F T K" stand for the words "for the kids".  It's what Norman is walking for.   They are what give meaning to his journey each and every step he takes. 

The sign that Norman will see as he crosses the border from Colorado to Kansas along Highway 50.  Off in the distance, barely to be seen in this photo, is the small town of Coolidge. 

You can't miss him!  Just watch for him along the way. 

We are alive and well along the Western Slopes of the great state of Colorado.

taking time to get used to the changes

The snow still sits atop the San Juan Mountains and although each day with the warmth of the summer's sun it little by little disappears, the "white stuff" is still visible nonetheless.  I've never lived in a place where you could see the last vestiges of the winter's snow for such a long period of time.  Back in Kansas people were sure to be griping when a late winter snowstorm would strike part of the state in the month of April.  We couldn't wait for winter's moisture to disappear because by then it's time to make the garden.  Shoot, one time I remember going out with my garden hose, turning on the water and spraying down the snow that just wouldn't seem to go away alongside the flower beds to the east side of my house back there.  After all, it WAS mid-April for crying out loud and snow was supposed to be long gone by then.  People are surely silly sometimes and I stand at the front of the  long line made up of those folks.  Not only do I stand at the front, I LEAD them :)

You know I have been here living in Colorado for the better part of over a year now and I have to admit that I still am getting used to all of the changes that I have been a witness to.  You'd think that I would be well acclimated to my surroundings and life here by this point in time, yet I still struggle with some of them.  The snow on the mountains is one of the big ones that I've had to get used to but it is only one of many changes. 

Every once in a while, I still get a longing for my life back on the plains of the Midwest.  Sometimes I must admit that just a tinge of sadness overcomes me and I wonder what all of my friends and family back there are doing at any given time.  I used to worry a lot about that, the idea of being so very homesick, but now I know it was just a normal reaction to a very changed lifestyle for me. God was laying me over His anvil and with His mighty hammer in hand, was shaping me for my new life here.   It hurt sometimes but I survived and thrived to become the person that I am this day.  My extreme homesickness, the kind that could debilitate a person if they let it, has all but disappeared.  Sure, I miss Kansas and its people but not to the point that I just simply want to give up.  I knew that when I got to that point in time it would be a sign that I was getting better and what a relief that change in my thinking provided for me.  Life is proving to be quite "OK" in the Rocky Mountains of south western Colorado.  I do have a purpose here, a real reason for being over 600 miles away from my old home in Kansas.  When I finally accepted that, now so many months ago, life became quite a bit easier.  Thankful for that blessing and equally grateful for my new life here.

There have always been different things that I've noticed about my surroundings. things that tell me I am definitely no longer in Kansas.  I still cannot get used to the idea that lots of roads out here go by numbers.  6700 road connects up with 50 Highway and if I can only remember that then I stand a pretty good chance of never getting too lost.  Up in Grand Junction I always smile when I see roads like "23.25 road".  Kind of strange but you figure it out after a while.  There are plenty of other dissimilarities about life here.  People have ranches, not farms.  Boys wear cowboy hats, belts and boots to school, not because it is "dress up like a cowboy" day but rather because they truly are cowboys.  The whole theme of living in the Great American West is quite prevalent all the way from the shops that line Main Street to the tourists who fly into the Montrose Regional Airport to visit places like Telluride, just a ways up the road from us here.  I am a flatlander transplanted into the Rocky Mountains and I'm getting stronger each and every day.  I like that about me and I have no plans to stop growing in strength.  It takes time and when Mike Renfro told me early on last summer to take "baby steps", he knew exactly what he was talking about.  It worked then and continues to work now when something comes up that makes me question whether or not I could actually make it here.  It has never been an accident that I came here nor was it a mistake made on my part.  I'm living through and in the next part of the master plan for my life. 

Ok, ok....here's something you don't know.  Right before I started this post just an hour or so ago, I was feeling homesick for Kansas.  Not bad but noticeable.  I haven't felt homesick for a long time but I ran across something in a box that made me think of friends back there.  So I'm sitting on the porch asking God to help me take away the sadness and realize that it's "ok" to once in a while miss home.  And then, well then it happened.  The "sign" came and just like that I knew I would be ok.  We've got alfalfa fields all around us here in the valley and our home just outside of town is surrounded by them.  A couple of days back all of the fields were mown down and then turned in preparation for the baling of the hay.  As I sat there on the front deck meditating about life and why every once in a while I feel this longing for the people I left behind back there, I heard the noise of a tractor pulling a baler and realized that it was time to make the hay.  What a sight to see as around the corner came a John Deere tractor pulling a Massey Ferguson baler.  My father, a custom cutter in the Great Plains for over a quarter of a century, ran Massey Ferguson combines.  He always swore that they were very best to use and he never failed to run them.  Dad was NOT a fan of John Deere machinery and I had to laugh as I saw them come by.  You know, just the sight of those familiar things to me from the times when I was growing up with a father who was a farmer, lifted my spirits high and took away the sadness.  You know what?  I'm taking that as a sign, even a gift from somewhere so very far away that life is really pretty good and that some amazing things await me here in my new home and life as a Coloradoan.  I feel better now having written this which is generally the case with me.  It's always better to talk when you are sad about something.  I've learned the hard way what happens when you do not. 

Can you believe we have made it already to the 24th day of June?  Time for me to get this day started and even though we have lots of daylight available this day, I still cannot afford to be trading "daylight for dark".  Friends have I told you lately how much you mean to me?  If not, please consider it done this day.  Thank you for all you do for me and for others out there.  We'd all be in a world of hurt without one another around to pick up the slack when help is much needed.  Have a great day everyone~

                                         Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

                                                Thanks for the "sign" Dad.

                                      The beauty of the mountains, ever present here.

                             Our first July 4th together, now nearly a year ago.  We made it!

~thinking I would have made a great pioneer NOT~

With the very best of intentions yesterday, Mike hauled his tent over to the house from the storage shed and set it up on our front lawn.  We have never done any camping together and we wanted to see if the tent was all in order and then use last night as a kind of "dry run" before entertaining any notion of heading to a favorite spot in the mountains for the weekend.  By mid-afternoon Hotel Renfro was up and ready to be slept in.

                                            Seven hours before bedtime last night~

     I wish I could say that I was a camper but after last night's experience, I think I may have failed miserably.  After 4.5 hours of lying on a sleeping bag inside of a tent set atop the grass of our front yard, I gave it up.  My back, hips, and shoulders (shoot it was really my whole dang body)  were saying to me, "What the heck is this?  Are you crazy?"  After tossing and turning in somewhat fitful sleep, I woke Mike up to say that Sally the Dog and I were heading in.  I finished up my last 3 hours of sleep inside our 100-year old farmhouse, atop the comfortable mattress of our bed.  Mike's tent sleeps four very easily so I think that the next time we do this (if there IS a next time), an air mattress will be in order.  Mike is still out there and sound asleep, obviously much tougher than his Flatlander wife would be :)  I admire anyone who can do that, especially thinking of our friend Norman who does it on a regular basis as he travels across the country on his 3,000 mile plus hike. 

     In my 13 months of living here along the Western Slopes, I have thought many times of the pioneers who came west so long ago now and helped to settle the Territory of Colorado allowing it to become a state in 1876.  Holy cow, they didn't traverse the mountains on nice , modern day highways like U.S. 50 or Interstate 70.  They weren't driving cars with AC and GPS devices.  There were no cell phones with towers strategically placed along the way to call AAA for help when they forgot to fill up the tank or any time that they inadvertently ran over a hazard in the road that gave them an immediate flat tire.  Those guys came by wagons or oxcarts or even by foot and I'm guessing that they kept their bellyaching to a minimum.  They were determined to make their lives here and that perseverance paid off for them.  I've read several stories written about early day Colorado history while I've been living here.  Time and time again, accounts of early day settlers freezing to death in the deep dark  of winter while they got caught in snowstorms was pretty much commonplace.  Shortages of food and other supplies just added to the overall very dismal picture of early day life here.  Morale had to be at the level of "rock bottom" but they "soldiered" on and made their homes here in the great Rocky Mountains of Colorado. 

     Now fast forward more than 125 years or so and here I find myself living along the Western Slopes.  When I go back and forth to Kansas to visit family and friends, I do so from the comfort of a car that makes the long 611 mile journey with little trouble.  I sometimes worry about the weather over Monarch Pass but I have the luxury of adjusting my departure times according to whether or not the Weather Channel predicts a major storm to come through up there.  I keep in contact with my family and friends along the way to let them know that I am fine and one thing I am sure of and the one thing is this~ I am glad that I was not a pioneer, that the good Lord knew I would make a much better Kansan turned Coloradoan in the year 2014 than I would have in the days of the pioneer times. 

     It is an interesting life here, one filled with plenty of opportunities as well as a myriad of  challenges.  I surely have come a long way since the first day I set foot upon this clay-filled soil as a lonely and homesick farmer's daughter from the great Midwest.  My attitude has improved a hundred-fold and if asked how I like living here, generally speaking I will remark that I'm glad that I finally got used to it.  It's "ok" in Colorado.  That it is my place in time now and that I was truly meant to be here.  Every once in a while, I still revert to the somewhat "sucky" attitude that I had about being surrounded by mountains and not being able to see forever like I did living in Kansas.  Just the other evening, the check out clerk at one of the local stores got to talking to me about my being from Kansas and she told me that she too was a "Jayhawker".  She had asked for a transfer from the store she was working at back in Lawrence for a new position out here in Montrose.  The lady was quite nice and when she said to me, "How do you like it here?", I replied about how much the mountains had bothered me even still today well over a year since I arrived.  I'll never forget her response to that when she said, "You ARE a flatlander, aren't you?"  I guess she is right.

     Well the day has begun anew and on this the 21,424th day of my life I have no real idea of what awaits me.  And although I was not created to be a pioneer wife who came with her husband to the great American West with a wagon load of their most needed possessions, I was chosen to be a modern day pioneer of sorts as I went from one extreme to the other in establishing a new life here with my husband Mike.  As I sit here looking out the kitchen window and soaking in the scenery of my new surroundings, I'm grateful for how far I have come in both distance and in my attitude about the changes that I have encountered.  Do I have a ways to go yet?  Oh yeah, I have quite a ways.  In faith I go forward, because I am way more determined to make it here just fine than I would ever be afraid to try in the first place.  My life is filled with blessings and if you are reading this, then please consider yourself one of them.  Have a great day friends and family, wherever you are on planet Earth.  I'm thinking of you all and holding you close in my heart.





    


    

    

~upon the subject of what ever you might refer to it as...soda, pop, or soda pop~

By noontime yesterday the alfalfa fields adjacent to our house here in Montrose County had been cut, neatly swathed into straight rows of green sustenance for some hungry cow or horse out there.  Later on it will be baled into gigantic round packages and hauled away on the back of a flatbed trailer.  When I saw the whole process begin in earnest at mid-morning yesterday, I smiled.  Even though 14,000 feet plus mountains surround us here and Kansas is just pretty far away over the top of one of the biggest ones, simple acts like the cutting hay remind me of my life back there on the plains.  I am a farmer's daughter and the blood of the land, whether it be here in the mountains or back there in the Sunflower state, shall pretty much always run through me.  I shall believe that until I take my last breath.  I love the land.

It's summertime, now "officially" on the calendar on this 21st day of June.  The summer solstice has arrived and folks everywhere are going to be the beneficiaries of some extra sunlight for their enjoyment.  For Mike and I it will be a busy day in the great outdoors and we will be practicing that age old adage of "making hay while the sun still shines" pretty much all day long.  We seldom have a Saturday available to us like we do this weekend and it sure is helpful to be able to find the time to catch up on things that normally have this way of eluding us during the weekday.

I was thinking back this morning to some of the greatest of summertime memories I've had in this long 58-year old life of mine.  Do you ever do the same?  Perhaps you have favorite recollections of your childhood years or even what you did as a teenager during the wonderful months of June-August.  And if you have reached your adult years and beyond, are you continuing to make fun memories to store away in your heart and in your mind?  I hope so. 

It's strangely weird, all of the things that our old brains can store up in them.  There are things up there in mine that have been stowed away for many years, neatly tucked into some kind of organizational fashion.  They sit there and wait for just the right moment to "pop" into our thinking.  When you really least expect it, there they are.  I was walking along the aisle of City Market here in Montrose yesterday and saw on the shelf some little fizzy tablets for kids to put into glasses of water and immediately thought about the ones that we once in a while got when we were kids.  We came from a big farming family, seven kids in all.  Times were lean and very tight at many moments during our growing up years.  But when I was very little I can remember my mom having a couple of packets of those things up in the kitchen cupboards and for a very special treat once in a while, we could have one in a glass of water.  Think early day soda pop here, ok?  Having a glass of Pepsi Cola was basically unheard of for me as a little kid growing up on our farm in the Sandhills of Harvey County, Kansas but THOSE little fizzy things?  Shoot, why even ask for pop?  We had those, well we had those little fizzy things and that was all right by me.

When I was 9 our parents moved us all to the small Kansas town of Haven.  By that time the "big kids" in our family (what we called the first 3 of the seven) had grown up and moved away leaving the "little" ones (what we always called the last 4 of us) in a family that had changed in size.  You know we still didn't have soda pop to drink on a regular basis but by now, at least once in the summer our mom would go down to the country store just a mile or so away and bring us all back a wooden case filled with 24 bottles of pop to share.  I can still see what that wooden container looked like, filled with four varieties of pop with six bottles of each.  I learned early on how to do multiplication just by studying that crate and its very valuable contents.  Let's see now.... there was always Pepsi, 7-Up, Grape and then, well then there was also a weird drink called Chocolate Soldier.   4x 6=24 was never a hard math fact for me to remember.  We had to make that 24 bottles of pop last all summer long.  So generally speaking we reserved its consumption for special occasions only.  When we DID have it, each bottle was generally apportioned out 3 different ways.  If you wanted it to last, then you learned to drink it slow because when it was gone, it was indeed just that....gone.  We would gather up the bottles, fill our little red wagon with soapy water and wash the bottles clean.  They were worth money to us in their emptied state and believe me, not a one was thrown into the trash pile. 

By the time we had been at Haven a couple of years, our parents built a restaurant and service station there and by the time I was 11, I found myself working as a waitress during the summer and on the weekends.  We had come a long ways in our journey as a family and the little girl who only dreamed of having all of the soda pop in the world that she could drink was now serving it to customers and LOTS of it.  A beverage dispenser on the counter served up a whole lot of small and large glasses of it to the patrons who would order pop with their meals.  Imagine that!  People were ordering pop with their food :)  I can still remember (oh man, one of those crazy recollections that you would think would be gone now) that our very first prices for pop were 15 cents for a small glass and an entire quarter for a large one.  What a nice feeling it was as a teenager growing up in the greatest hometown EVER to just walk over to the pop machine after school was out and draw myself up what ever kind I desired. 

I'm still a soda pop drinker today, be it bad or good for me.  My favorite is now a diet vanilla Pepsi or Dr. Pepper and if you know me at all then you will know automatically where I prefer to buy it from :)  I've tried most unsuccessfully over the years to give up the pop drinking habit.  Sometimes I make it through the Lenten season once a year but other than that, I guess you would say I am hooked to it.  My mother loved diet Coke and my siblings will concur with me that she nearly always had a can of it in the refrigerator to enjoy all day long.  I come by my taste for it quite naturally.

The sun is peeking over the Black Canyon of the Gunnison now and it is time to begin this new day.  May your day be filled with goodness everyone as you get out to enjoy the blessings that await you.  If you are reading this then you have awoken just like me.  There's a reason for that, you know?  What shall await us?  We won't know until we get out there and find it.  I'm thinking of you all this day and even though most of you are so many miles away now, in my heart it is as if you are right here beside me.  I like that thought.

My dad, standing in front of our restaurant and service station on Highway 96 back in Haven, Kansas.  It was torn down many years later and replaced by a convenience store.  A lot of happy memories were made there during nearly 10 years of being in business. 

Ok, ok ....so we DIDN'T have soda pop to drink until we were much older but she turned out ok :)  I will always be thankful that I grew up in a large family, a farming family and as a Kansan.  Living through some times that were on the "lean side" prepared me to meet the challenges that would lie ahead for me as an adult.  I was loved by my family and very well taken care of.  We always had enough and in reality, that's all any of us need at any given moment in time.

It was the one kind of pop in that wooden crate from now, so long ago that no one really cared for.  In fact, I can remember from time to time giving my share to my siblings.  It was a strange concoction, kind of like chocolate milk and carbonated water gone bad, really bad.

From a hot summer's day back in 2011....  Now THIS guy I am fond of.  He calls me his "Aunt Peggy".  Haven folks, is your trash being hauled away each week in a timely fashion?  If so, it's because my nephew Christopher Scott is behind the wheel and taking good care of you :)

~upon letting whatever happens this day be for the "good"~

Good morning to you friends and family from us here along the Western Slopes.  Happy June 20th to you all, the day before the official summer solstice.  If you ever wanted to enjoy a day filled with the most daylight possible, well folks get ready to enjoy it tomorrow.  Within a week or more, the calendar will turn to July and we will all sit back and wonder, "where in the heck did June go anyway?"  Life goes on and on as time flies faster seemingly each day with little regard to how people feel about it.  When we are young and waiting to grow up and be on our own, it drags as slow as a bike with a flat tire.  Yet when you get to be my age of "looking 59 square in the eyes" you sometimes want to apply the brakes and say "Whoa! Enough of the hurrying to the end.  I'll find the finish line quick enough as it is."

Come this October, I will celebrate another year of life and living.  It does seem strange to think of soon being the age of 59.  My father died at that age after living through and dying from a very brief and pain filled 18-month bout of lung cancer.   I was only 27 when he passed away and as I look back on it now, I think I was looking at my father as being pretty old.  Now that I have caught up to his age, I realize just how young he really was :)  I surely do miss that guy.

Sometimes I like to look back at where I have come from as I read through blog posts that I have made before during the nearly 4 year period of time that I've been journaling online.  I laugh at some of the things I've written about and from time to time find my eyes tearing up as I read some of the others.  To be honest, there are a few posts that I've completely forgotten about making for one reason or another so it's like reading it for the first time.  Not sure what that says of my memory but I don't worry about it.  I guess it's a good thing that I wrote it down to begin with because I dang sure wouldn't have recalled it if I hadn't.  Writing allows me to document the struggles as well as the good moments, the real blessings of my existence here on earth. 

I found one of my very earliest of posts from the 22nd day of June in 2011, one made as I was beginning to work on a bucket list idea of learning how to swim well enough to save my own life one day.  I was a 55 year old woman with a lifelong fear of getting into water that came anywhere above my ankles and since I'm a short woman to begin with, well you see how pathetic that fear was.  A very good friend back home in Kansas had told me that I needed to get over that idea of water phobia and take adult swimming lessons.  I listened to him and did just that but it wasn't easy.  The blog post reprinted below tells of my thoughts just 24 hours prior to re-entering the water for the first time since I was a very little kid.  I laugh at it now as I read it and smile to think that I was even able to do it in the first place.  It is printed below, if you would so care to read it. 

Time to get this good day going and enjoy every minute that I can in the daylight hours that will follow.  Take care of yourselves out there and enjoy this wonderful season of summertime.  It's Friday and a great day to be alive in.  We were meant to be here, you and I.  Make everything of it that you can and don't waste one minute of the time allotted to you.  Whatever happens today, let it be for the "good".

A Blog Post from 3 years back
June 22, 2011~"Getting Closer"

 
     "Well, it's now Wednesday evening and less than 48 hours before swimming lesson number 1 begins.  I thought by now I might be feeling REALLY scared about doing it.....maybe even thinking about excuses I could think up so I wouldn't have to go.  You know, something like, "Laurie, I hate to have to cancel my first lesson but ___________(fill in the blank with some lame-brain excuse).    Call it "denial" if you wish, but for now I have just kind of come to peace with the fact that I'm going down to the YMCA on Friday morning and try to learn to swim.  

    
     You've heard it said that "too much knowledge" isn't always a good thing?  I think that saying may well have come about when someone, just like me, spent hours on the internet trying to find the solution to getting over their fear of swimming.  And the end result was that they were even more confused and frightened than they were before hand.  I spent a lot of time "googling" phrases like, "fear of swimming" and "afraid of the water."  Most of the places that  I found were of little use to me.

    
    There was a site, however, that was pretty plain and to the point.  It offered 5 things to consider prior to heading to the very first swimming lesson.  I found it to be actually quite helpful instead of making things seem much worse.  Their thoughts:
 

1.  pinpoint your fear-Why are you so afraid of learning to swim?
Easy for me to answer that one...Thought I was going to drown on day #1 of swim lessons at age ten.  Never seemed to get over that dreadful event.

2.  positive self-talk-What good things can come from learning to swim?  Well, I'm trying to learn so I can swim well enough to save my own life sometime.  That should count for something.  And, since a very qualified swim instructor is helping me, I shouldn't be worrying about anything further.

3.  set goals-What do I want to do?  Hey, that's simple....I want to show up at each of the 4 lessons that I have already paid for, get into the pool, pay attention to the instructor, and learn.  In other words, I prefer to not "chicken out."

4.  get a qualified teacher-Already did that...Laurie is the best choice for me.  

5.  go slow-Is there any other way?   

     When I slide into that pool on Friday, it will be the first time that I've gotten into a swimming pool since 1965....seriously.....46 years ago.  Oh I've dangled my feet into the very shallow end of swimming pools since then...but dangling is the extent of it.  I don't expect to be a champion swimmer at the end of the 4th and final lesson.  If I am lucky, I'll learn to at least float on my back without getting scared that I will sink and drown.  

     In the days since I decided to give swimming a try, I have run into a handful of adults who, just like me, have never learned to swim.  This afternoon I ran into a friend who discreetly took me aside and whispered in my ear..."Don't feel bad Peggy.  I never learned to do it either." 

   
     Hey, I didn't mention it but I found lots of sites directed at only adults who wanted to learn to swim.  Didn't seem to matter your gender, age, where you lived, how much money you made. If you truly wanted to learn how to swim, there was a program out there to teach you. 

   
     One such school for adult non-swimmers boasted "Learn how to swim like an Olympian in only 6 days!"  They guaranteed that claim with the quote, "Over  30,000 satisfied adults world wide."  When they said  "world wide", they meant it.  Their swimming schools were in Bahrain and Phoenix, Arizona. 

   
     Nah, I think I'll still just trot the half-mile over to the YMCA and give Laurie a chance to teach me.

 Standing alongside the very best swim teacher that there ever was at the Hutchinson YMCA, summer of 2011 just a couple of weeks before my bicycling accident.  Good thing I got those swimming lessons done when I did.  I'm thinking that my long arm, neon pink cast would not have fared to well in a water-filled swimming pool.

Following Norman

"It has now been a week that we came upon him walking along the highway to the east as he pushed a cart in front of him, one filled with his supplies and personal belongings.  We recognized him right away and stopped immediately alongside the roadway. As he turned to look back at us, a wonderful smile came across his face.  Mike and I had found Norman Horn, a 30-year old man who we had seen on the local news from Grand Junction only a few days earlier.  He was coming through our part of the world on his 3,000 mile hike from the west coast to the east, all to bring about awareness of the disease that has become the greatest killer of children, childhood cancer.  We stopped Norm, a stranger along the highway  because we wanted to know how to best help his cause.  As we drove away, the three of us were strangers no more.  Each Thursday as I blog from now until Norman finishes his epic walk in the month of October along the eastern coastline, I plan to use my blog as a way to update anyone reading it about his progress.  You can also follow the journey on his website, www.coast2coastftk.com or on his Facebook page by the same name."

 The first thing that caught my eye that early evening last week along Highway 50 was the cart he was pushing and the sign affixed to the front inside cover of it.  Neatly scrawled in letters that made the "teacher" in me happy, were the words "fight childhood cancer".  A couple of days later when Mike and I met Norman in Gunnison for a late afternoon lunch, he was happy to oblige my request to take a photo of it.  We didn't realize it when we first met on the road, but Norman had been pushing that cart for over 700 miles with a broken front wheel. He had made what repairs he could do himself and plodded on.  It was while he was staying the weekend in Gunnison that a man there helped him by taking it to his shop and doing the repairs on it himself.  Customer service wasn't working out so well from the company that manufactured it.  Personal service, the kind made from the power of the "human touch", by a Gunnison resident named Will literally saved the day.  I love to hear stories like that, stories that tell of really good people, ordinary and very humble folks, who step up to pick up the slack and help out others who really need it.  I don't know you Will but in my books, folks like you are pretty much a hero.

I cannot even imagine what it would be like to rely on an apparatus like Norm's cart to help a hiker make it all the way, 3,000 miles plus across the United States.  Think about it for a moment.  You've got some clothing, food and water, supplies for emergencies, tent and whatever else you might need to survive changes in altitude, weather, and a variety of climates.  I'm looking around our 100-year old farmhouse right now and just visualizing all the stuff we have here that we deem so very necessary to live our lives along the Western Slopes.  Surely thinking that some of it would probably have to go if we were trekking along as Norman is.  The lifestyle he has chosen would definitely have to go into the "traveling light" mode, a textbook example of minimalist living.  After having lunch with him and hearing his story, it became obvious from the "get go" that Norman's focus in life at this moment in time is not about how many material possessions he can amass at his very young age.  His purpose in life, in the very steps that he takes each and every day can most well be summed up in the words that the letters "F T K" stand for.  He's doing all of it "for the kids".

Yesterday he had made the descent off of old Monarch Pass and was working his way down the mountain and towards the Colorado city of Salida.  If he is not already there, he will be very soon.  His path takes him right along the same route that I have driven so many times in my journey back and forth between my former home in Hutchinson, Kansas and my new home here in Montrose County, Colorado.  I know the way with my eyes closed and I worry (ok, ok it's the Mother in me) about how he will make it.  Norman reiterated time and time again that he is most careful and to not fear for him.  Lots of good people drive past him each day and many stop to ask him about what he is doing and how they can help, just like Mike and I did.  I have no doubt at all in my mind that his journey will take him all the way to his final destination, a late October arrival along the Atlantic Ocean. 

I hope that the road is very kind to him and that somewhere along the way, someone will offer him assistance when they can.  A drink of water, a friendly hello, an extra snack or two and the chance for some conversation along what might at times be a very lonely highway.  My heart was so touched that night that we first met him when Mike immediately got out of our car and reached behind the seat in our stash of snacks for the road and found a box of granola bars that we had purchased only moments before.  Norman most gratefully accepted them, a gift from one man to another.  Mike Renfro is just like that.  Norman Horn?  Well, he's just like that too.

Kansas, my home state, he is coming your way so very soon.  Please dear friends as you see him walking along the roadway, remember him and know that he is a good man, a decent human being who is out there doing what he can to help people become aware that way too many kids in this country of ours will never grow into adulthood.  Their lives will be lost to cancer and that's about as sad as one can imagine.  If you are a Kansan or heck even know one and would like to help in any way as he sojourns through the Sunflower State, please email me and let me know.  Thanks to the folks who have already said they would provide lodging if it is needed.  I will pass all the information on to Norman. 

Well, the dawn is soon to break here over the mountains and it is time to begin this new day that we have all been given.  My hope and prayer is that somehow or another we can all go out the front doors of our homes this morning and find the destiny that awaits us.  Keep your eyes and your hearts open.  Let your mind be ready to accept every blessing there is out there, each opportunity to make a difference.  You say you'd never be able to walk 3,000 miles across the country?  That's ok because neither would I and that's why I am thankful that young men like Norman Horn can and do.  But I tell you my dear friends, some of the greatest of chances we have to make a positive impact upon this world are most often right under our noses all along.  Look around you today and see if you can find them.  They are waiting for you and for me too.  It does not matter where you start as long as you do :)

The finest man I ever knew lost his life to cancer at age 59.  He's my dad.  Later on this year I will turn 59 as well.  Perhaps this is a reason why Norman's cause is so very meaningful and important to me.  Cancer, whether it affects the very young or any other age, is such a devastating disease to endure.

 The sign that Norman will see when he crosses over from Colorado into the great state of Kansas near the tiny little spot called "Coolidge".  Kansas, please wrap your arms around him and take good care of him along the way.  Your lives will be blessed for so doing.

~practicing perseverance~

Finally the wind has decided that it is ok, acceptable, the "right thing to do" and has died down.  In fact, save for the somewhat bit of a breeze going on out there it's just pretty dang quiet.  For two days now its incessant presence has taken a whole lot of fun out of being outside on an otherwise nice summer day.  The mountains stayed visible until the late afternoon but once again, just like the day before it, dirt and dust obscured their view for many hours.  How I longed to at least see a nice sunset at the end of the day but that didn't happen either.  Although this is nothing like the days of the Great Dustbowl, thankfully at least not yet, I couldn't help but wonder if this is what it might have looked like for those folks living in the Great Plains states who endured those dark days when dust and dirt were your constant companions, now over 75 years ago.


Good morning friends and family from this place so far away, the Western Slopes of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.  From our home here in Montrose County, I send you greetings and hope that truly all will be well for you and for me and for ALL of us this Wednesday morning.  It felt nice to be able to let Sally the dog out for her early morning "break" and to not be blown away by a howling dirt-filled wind.  The leaves of the stately Cottonwood trees that ring the yard around our house are still blowing in the breeze but at least I can make out that what they are instead of seeing just a rapidly moving green blur.  Weather is so unpredictable it would seem and certainly nothing that we have any charge over.  Here in our area the temperatures will dip down into the 30's overnight tomorrow allowing us to wake up a bit on the chilly side.  Last evening on the weather they were even talking about winter storm watches/warnings for the mountains in Utah.  Up on old Monarch Pass, our friend Norm is camping and readying himself to come down on the other side of the great Continental Divide.  His slumber was probably a bit on the chilly side of it all.  More on Norm in a blog post tomorrow but we continue to wish him well and monitor his progress from here.

I have thought a lot about the subject of perseverance in the past few months and for some reason it remains something that floats just at the surface of my thinking most days lately.  It has now been well over 13 months that I have made the great state of Colorado my home and believe me when I tell you I had to practice some pretty seriously big-time perseverance to make it here in this strange land.  It felt like I was lain across God's anvil on a nearly daily basis, especially at first as I did my best to figure out that it was "ok" to leave Kansas and life there as I made a "new life" here with Mike.  Homesickness, loneliness, discouragement and a thousand other things did their level best to try and take me down, to force me to throw in the towel and say "I quit."  Try as they might, it just didn't happen.  Every hardship that I encountered seemed to be outweighed by a dozen good things that arrived to take its place.  The end result, now many weeks and months later, is a new found strength that I didn't even realize was there.  Shoot, I didn't have any idea that I was this strong :)

This summer I am working as a CNA, providing services to folks in their homes.  These people desperately desire to stay out of long-term nursing home care and they are practicing the art of perseverance each and every day.  It isn't easy for them and each would be the first to say that perhaps giving up might be easier in the long run.  Yet they choose to not succumb to the challenges that life presents them now in their advancing years.  I admire them.  Each of them.  All of them.  When I finish growing up, I hope that I can remember their good examples of independent living no matter how difficult the challenges of everyday living may be.  I love taking care of them, people who in their own ways have become like heroes to me. 

The day is soon to begin here and only the good Lord above knows how it all will play out for us.  Will we be called to practice the fine art of perseverance?  More than likely it would seem.  Over the years many famous quotes have been given on the subject of not giving in, no matter how long it might take to do something.  One I came across is from J. R. R. Tolkien from the classic read The Hobbit.  Eleven short, sweet, and simple words~

"So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending."

Speaking as one who has had to slay at least a gazillion dragons in 58 years of living, it pays to persevere.  May your day be well my friends and may the journey of this day be one filled with peace, love, hope, and understanding.

The view from deep inside of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison a few weekends back.  The early day pioneers and settlers here in this area had to be pretty determined to make Colorado their home.  Talk about having to practice the fine art of perseverance.

At the bottom of the Black Canyon very near to our home here in Montrose, stopping to take our photo.  I would have made a horribly poor specimen of a pioneer wife back 125 years ago yet I do consider myself a pioneer woman of sorts this day in 2014.  It's all in how you look at it, I suppose.  All in how you look at it.

~upon the subjects of the wind and wildlife~

All day long yesterday the wind seemed to blow like crazy.  It was weird to look out last evening and find the 14,000 ft.  mountains obscured from view because of all the dirt/dust that was being sent our way from a number of states to the south west of us.  Nothing stayed put outdoors, including outdoor furniture, plants and my already unruly "mop" of hair.  I know that I for one was pretty tired of it before the day was through.  This early morning things are much quieter and as I gaze out the kitchen window, there they are once again.  The San Juan Mountains have magically reappeared and things look pretty much back to normal.  You know, I always thought that I was used to the wind from living in Kansas for so many years.  Sometimes it seems so different here in Colorado.  Funny thing about we humans and wind.  We always figure to want the wind to blow in just the right direction and at just the right speed and at a convenient time for us.  On a hot summer's day, we want a slightly noticeable  breeze to come up and use the sweat from our bodies to provide that little cooling effect.  When the wind doesn't do as we deem the "right" thing, we pretty much complain loudly.  Human nature, I suppose.

This was the view last evening about 8:00 or so.  Some very majestic peaks were made nearly invisible to sight by the power of the wind and a whole lot of dust.

The summer is flying by us, so very fast it would seem.  Now the calendar says that we are over halfway through the month of June and truly it won't be all that long before school begins again in mid-August.  This summer is so much different than the last one was here along the Western Slopes.  My purpose here is a whole lot more focused and since I am determined to make it here living as a Coloradoan, things are going so much more smoothly.  It's not like life is absent of any trials, challenges, or hardships because there continue to be my share and then some.  But my plan is to stay the course and to not give up.  Life goes a whole lot smoother that way and I suppose the sooner we all realize that, the better off things will end up going for all of us.

We haven't seen so much of the deer this summer.  There is a small herd that frequents the field of grass growing to the north of us on the other side of the road.  They never seem to want to get very near to the road and the few times that I've tried to get a photo of them, they pretty much shy away and take out even further to the north.  The group that came through here last summer always stayed on the south side of the house and got so close to the fence that separates our house from the alfalfa field they were grazing in, that you could have almost felt the warm breath of their nostrils.  Shoot, they were so friendly that you might have expected them to knock on the door and ask if they could have a drink of water or something.  I've been thinking about why there is such a difference this summer, why the lack of wildlife so close at hand.  You know, I always figured that the deer from last June-August were sent to me.  Like a gift from God, a distraction from being so lonely and homesick in my new life here.  When I hadn't the time or opportunity yet to make new friends, I could at least look forward to their visits each morning and evening.  Their appearance gave me something else to think about, to focus upon rather than how much I missed Kansas and home.  Picture after picture I took of them and I still smile when I think of how excited I would be as I yelled to Mike....

"Oh my gosh!  They are back.  Where's my camera?"

 

 

I learned quickly to appreciate their beauty but to always remember to treat them as the wildlife that they truly are.



 Although I no longer rely on them for their companionship and ability to make my day go a whole lot better, I would still love to see them from time to time.  Perhaps later on in the summer a herd or two will come back and provide the daily entertainment that they did during the summer of 2013.  I remember the day that my camera broke and I momentarily panicked, afraid that I wouldn't be able to take any more photos.  A couple of days later, with a new camera in hand, I was back at it as I filled up an online album with the images of these wonderful creatures.

 

Well, the morning is moving along rather quickly and from the 5 hours since I began this post in the early morning darkness the wind has returned with a vengeance. The clean laundry that I hung out to dry is having a dickens of a time staying pinned to the clothesline.  The sun is shining, the sky a beautiful shade of robin's egg blue, only broken up by the presence of fluffy white clouds that are moving along rather quickly in the sky.  The flowers we have planted are surviving and a good thing that they can take the brunt of the wind that passes through here on any given day in the summertime.  They are alive and thriving.  The truth be known, so am I.  May you have a wonderful day my dear friends and family wherever this time in life should be finding you.   Our destiny awaits us on this good Tuesday, the 17th day of June.  



 



~and the little boy's name was Calvin~

"Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without even knowing it."  (Found in the "Good Book", Hebrews 13:2)

The little boy's name was Calvin and he was one of my students from back in the days when I taught a combination class of 1st and 2nd graders in the small, predominantly Old Order Amish town of Yoder, Kansas.  Calvin, an Amish youngster himself, had been diagnosed with leukemia as a very small child and by the time he had made it to my second grade classroom that year, had been in an ongoing battle with cancer  for many months.  He had been undergoing rounds of treatment just prior to the opening of school that year and because of that, had no hair at all left atop his little head.  I will never forget that first day at school when  he arrived wearing a woolen blue stocking cap on a very hot August day in Kansas.  His mother had warned me ahead of time that he probably would be too embarrassed to remove it, for fear what the kids might say.  So for myself and the other 25 students in our classroom that year, the very first order of business of the day was not to put our school supplies into our desks in an orderly fashion.  It wasn't even to put name tags on our clothing or have a "show and tell" time of what we did for fun on our summer vacations.  No, the first order of business, the most important thing to do that day was to convince young Calvin that even though he could wear his wintertime cap all day long in the stifling heat, we loved and respected him enough to say that it would be equally fine to remove it and put it on the coat hooks against the east wall.  A few minutes later he did just that and we all went on to have a great school year.  Each of us.  All of us.   Especially Calvin.

I was privileged to be Calvin's teacher for the two years that he was a first and second grader and equally blessed to be able to teach at Yoder for the remainder of his years there through the eighth grade.  As time went on and he grew into his teenage years, Calvin continued his fight against leukemia, a type of blood cancer that has its beginnings in the bone marrow.  The cost was high, both in terms of how it affected his overall health and the financial aspect of the ongoing medical care.  Many fundraisers were held on his behalf, both by the community at large and the school community as well.  Once we challenged ourselves in my classroom to come up with a mile of pennies in one month's time to give to Calvin for his medical care.  We ended up going way beyond a mile and at the end of the month were able to give his parents a check for nearly $4,000, all made possible because any time anyone saw the "lowly cent" lying around on the ground or in their dad's pocket, they threw it in a can and brought it to school.  We picked up aluminum cans in the springtime, even challenging (in a friendly way of course) the classes of my older sister Sherry's school down in Altus, Oklahoma to do the same and try to pick up more than we did.  The two schools did it for several years and the REAL winner always ended up being Calvin because the monies made from the recycling of the aluminum always went to his medical account.   Calvin did his best over the years to try and beat the disease that was robbing him of the normal life that other kids around him were having, yet try as he might, he lost the battle in his late teenage years.  Our hearts were broken but our lives had been changed for the good just by knowing that quiet and sweet young man.  We loved him.  In now, nearly 37 years of being an educator, I have taught many boys and girls and loved working with them all.  I should not have a favorite but I do.  It was Calvin.

You know, here's the deal.  Last week at this time, I would have never guessed that I would be making the blog post that I am this morning but stranger things have happened to me in this life.  Sometimes the events of the day can change just like that and people are put into place with one another at just the right moment in time.  Mike Renfro and I are very good examples of that because for crying out loud, how could two people's paths not cross for over 40 years and then all of a sudden, "voila!" they do?  I would like for you to meet a new friend of ours, one that we made in the strangest of places just this past Thursday evening along Highway 50 as we drove east towards Kansas out of Montrose.  His name is Norman Horn and the story of how we met him walking along the roadway, pushing a cart filled with supplies, will touch your heart.  It did ours.

Last week, just about this time, life was going along here in its normal chaotic fashion in the Renfro house.  I'm sure we were multi-tasking, just like we always seem to around here.  We had arisen and were getting things ready for the day that was about to begin.  Per the way that it usually happens in the early morning hours, the TV was going so that we could hear the news and weather on the station out of Grand Junction.  In my haste to get myself out the door that day, I wasn't paying all that much attention to the segment that was being shown about this guy that was walking all the way across the United States from the west coast to the east, to raise awareness about the number one killer of children in this country, cancer.  I briefly caught a glimpse of him, heard him saying a word or two about there being only one medication approved for treatment, as I scurried out the door for the day.  Mike watched the news segment in its entirety and we briefly talked about it later on.  Nothing more, nothing less.  By late that evening, I had completely erased the story of this man's journey from my memory but its departure would not be for very long.  Come later on in the week, as we were making our seemingly monthly trek back to Kansas, he would reappear only this time it would be for real and not as an image on our flat screen television.

As we were readying things for our departure from here along the Western Slopes on Thursday evening, Mike mentioned the young man once again saying that he hoped we might run across him sometime on the journey back to Kansas.  Because his walking adventure is taking him along the very same highway that we use each time we go back and forth to the Midwest, he knew that we probably would.  Mike had seen him a day or so earlier as he walked near the Escalante Canyon area between Delta and Olathe.  If we saw him, our plan was to stop and ask how we could make a donation to the site that has been established for those who wish to offer something to the cause he is giving nearly 8 months of his life to.  Sure enough, not even 30 minutes into our drive to the east, we found him as he pushed his cart along the way near the Morrow Point turnoff.   It was a life changing moment for both Mike and I.  Our chance meeting up with a person who prior to that very second in time was a total stranger to us, was not by "chance" or accident or random selection of the universe.  It was a part of a much greater plan that had been lain out for two kids from "the land of long ago and far, far away".  The photo shown above, taken yesterday when we found him once again in the city of Gunnison and stopped to take him to lunch, shows a man who is no longer unfamiliar to us.  Norman Horn is now our friend and we have so much admiration and respect for what is doing on behalf of kids, just like my student Calvin, who are afflicted with the disease of cancer. 

As we sat there with him yesterday and listened to his story of what life has been like since he left the west coast and took the very first step of the journey, the "mother" in me rose straight to the top and I repeatedly asked crazy questions like....

"Are you losing too much weight?  Are you getting dehydrated?  Have you ever been scared?  What do your parents think about this?  Do you always have cell phone service?  Is you cart full?  Because you know we have brought some more stuff to put into it.  How much water are you able to carry young man?   What about wild animals?  Do you know how narrow or nonexistent the roadway is up on Monarch Pass? How warm is that winter coat?  Do you know how cold it can get up there?  For crying out loud, please be careful!"

He answered all of my "mom questions" with a smile and assured me that I had no need to be concerned, that all is fine for him out there.  I watched the look in Mike's eyes as Norman told his stories of adventure on the road and for a moment there, I thought maybe my good husband was thinking of his own kind of walking trek.  Later on, he assured me that although it sounded like a great time that I didn't have to worry about it :)  We left Norman there in Gunnison and drove back to Montrose with our bellies full of food and our minds and hearts filled with even more thoughts of how to help him in the remaining months of his journey.   
 
By the time July rolls around, Norman will have made it to my home state, the state of my birth and most of my 58 years of life.  He will be walking all the way through Kansas as he follows Highway 50 to the northeast towards the Kansas City area.  Dear friends and family back home there who are reading this today, our friend Norman could use your help.  Could you offer up a place for him to rest for the night?  Perhaps you could allow him to use your bathroom shower to clean up in after a long day's journey or allow him to fill up his water containers.  Do you have room to sit an extra place at your table for suppertime or breakfast time or any time that a person might be hungry?  Could you possibly watch out for him along the way and stop to offer a smile and a handshake of encouragement?  One of the things that Norman reiterated over and over during our meal together yesterday was just how much he has enjoyed meeting all of the good folks along the way.  Their conversations with him continue to lift his spirit and keep his morale high.  Everywhere he has gone since leaving in April, the kindness of the human spirit has been with him.  For each bad encounter he has gone through, a thousand more good things have happened.  We were blessed to have met him and now find ourselves supporting his endeavor all of the way to the end as he reaches the east coast in October.

I encourage you to visit Norman's website www.Coast2CoastFTK.com and please read more about his incredible walking adventure.  You can also find his page on Facebook, Coast 2 Coast FTK and "like" it.  The stories and photos that he has posted from along the way will uplift you and remind you that the American spirit is alive and well, that the "power of the human touch" is evidenced each and every day if we can just allow ourselves to slow down long enough to see it.  Kansas friends and family, if you are able to help Norman as he sojourns through the Sunflower state, please message me on FB and let me know.  I will help you to connect to him along the way.  Our help is needed.

It's the "mom" in me, but please pray for Norman's safety as he makes the journey.  Pray that the people he encounters along the way will be as touched by his mission as we were here at our house.  Before we parted ways yesterday, I took off my St. Christopher's medal and pressed it into his hands.  It always meant so much to know that it was with me as I traveled back and forth over Monarch Pass in the more than nearly two dozen times that I traversed over it between Kansas and Colorado.  Today Norman starts out for his passage over the summit that stands at over 11,000 feet.  Just like all of you have done for me, I'll be praying him safely over that pass in the next three days. 

From now until his journey's end come this autumn, one of my blog posts each week will be devoted to an update of what is going on for him as he makes his way eastward.  I hope to share his adventures with my new class of students in the first grade at Olathe when school begins in August.  He gave me wristbands for them to have yesterday and I will most gladly share them with each of my little people.  It would seem appropriate so to do...after all the initials "FTK" stand for the words "for the kids".  That's what Norman's journey is all about and our life has been made better because of our meeting up with him. 

You know it's one thing to see a person on the news and think "Ok, that's a good cause" and go on.  It's quite another to meet them in person on a narrow and twisting section of Colorado pavement.