monique

Woolgathering
2004-09-29 11:21:43 (UTC)

End of Summer

I've finished the "My Favorite Photo of You" quilt and will
try to take a photo of it in the next few days and put it up
on my webshots page.
http://community.webshots.com/user/primquilter
I also want to take a photo of the snowball tree as the
leaves are just now beginning to change color.
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Tomorrow promises to be a busy day with two trips
to Albany and one to Corvallis. And here I am, up again at
3 a.m. I know I'm going to be tired. I already am tired.
*******************************************
I've read articles about how the Internet reduces human
interaction and I suppose that's true if one is talking
about face to face interaction but I've found it to be an
incredible tool for communication.

It was through the Internet I found men who'd served with
Steven in Vietnam. They were able to give me insights I
could have gotten in no other way. And not long ago I found
a woman very much like me, whose husband had died in Vietnam
and whose child had been stillborn not long afterwards.
It's reassuring to find someone else who's gone through the
same things I have, who doesn't think me strange or odd or
maudlin or crazy because there are times I mourn someone who
died more than thirty years ago.

We've endured and moved forward. Still, to this day, that
familiar, horrible stab of loss can strike. Particularly
these days, as TV screens and newspapers show photographs of
young women holding folded U.S. flags. Like me, she too has
a successful second marriage. And a kind, loving, patient
and supportive husband.

We talk about how our first husbands will remain forever
young and how hard it is to imagine what they would look
like now. They are frozen, forever, in time.

"You move on." my Internet friend wrote. "You live life.
But it's still painful." She suggested a book for me to
read. The library doesn't have it but I've requested it
through interlibrary loan:
A Wife's Vietnam by Dolores Riggs Davis

"That time remains the defining moment of your life. It
never goes away." she wrote to me not long ago. She's
right. It never does.




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