~and I will need them too~

It's hard to believe that the month of June is well over half complete.  Seems like yesterday that I was saying my good-byes to the third grade kids at Big Pasture and wishing for them a wonderful and happy summer vacation.  Time flies and this thing called "life" speeds right along with it, hand in hand.

Unlike the human heart, it never misses a beat.

I spent the first couple of weeks of summer vacation visiting my sister Sherry in the hospital in Wichita Falls.  It was good that she could be so close by and I quickly learned how to get down there from our home here along the Red River in record time.  I got to go there every day for nearly 3 weeks and now that I look back at it, I realize what a precious gift it really was to me.  Come to think of it, I imagine that it was a precious gift to her as well.  All it cost was a little bit of gas money and some time and really, who cannot find that?

Now she is gone and once her funeral and burial take place later on this week, it will be time to return to that thing called life.  Although it will never be the same, and it was never meant to be anyways, things have to continue on.  I've always maintained the truth in the age old saying, "you do not honor the dead by dying with them".  (I wish I knew the origin of that quote but it's important to me to remember.)

I have poured through the many pictures that we took together, not only in years past but in the recent two years that we've lived so close by one another, and have taken much solace in them. Every time we saw one another, I told her that we should take our picture.  The strange thing was that she never refused to do so.  Sometimes she would ask to wait a moment to remove her oxygen tubing or to put her walker to the side.  Once in a while, I would straighten her hair just like she would do for me.  I'm not sure how that all started but maybe the good Lord was telling me to be prepared and that perhaps Sherry's departure from this earth would come quicker than I would realize.  

And so we did.
I think if I had to pick a favorite one, and it's really a tough call to do that, I'd have to choose the one shown below.

We took this a couple of years back in October of 2015 on our way back home to Kansas.  I was readying my house back in Hutchinson for sale, and Sherry went with me back there half a dozen times to help me with the process.  Only Sherry and I would understand this, but she was the "snack girl" and the "coin person" for that 5 hour trip up and down I-35.   This picture is actually photo number one out of a gazillion that we took that time.  Neither of us could stop laughing long enough to take the picture.  One of us would say that we didn't look quite right, so I would take it again and again.  I'm sure the people sitting next to us in the parking lot of the gas station at Guthrie, Oklahoma must have thought were were crazy.  Maybe we were but if I should choose to act crazy, I cannot think of a person I'd rather do it with than Sherry.

When someone dies, those who remain behind have to learn the process of going on and for me I hope the process comes easier than it feels like it will today.  Right now it kind of sucks and I suppose that for a while it will.  Sherry would be the very first person to remind me that this summer of 2017, one that has begun in such a mournful way, will not last forever and that sooner than I realize, August will roll around and another year of school will begin. For me it will be my 40th year in the classroom, a goal I have long striven to attain. There is a sweet class of children who don't even know their teacher yet just up the road aways at Grandfield, Oklahoma.  They will need me and the truth of the matter is this.

More than they can imagine, I will need them too.

This was the last picture we took together when she came home from the hospital in early June.