A New Page Turning

I feel like this week is going to be one of those weeks where things are just going to be changing.

I don't know what it really is, because on one hand it is exciting and yet on another it is the unknown.  My next door neighbors are moving to assisted living this week. and that is getting to be one of those inevitable things that I knew would come, but I never totally grasped it.  They have been like second grandparents for me and my sisters while we have grown up.

They would make us cookies, and random cakes.  They would send us birthday cards (when she arthritis wasn't bad she would draw us cards with Disney characters on them).  They had our spare key if we were ever locked out.  and they were always there.  Having them there, it taught me, while growing up, that you don't have to see eye to eye, to find one playing field that you are on an even field.

Over the past few years, they have been both been getting older. Him with diabetes, and her with a stroke that has left he not talking for over a year.  But, while their bodies are beginning to fail them, they are still the same neighbors that have been next door since we moved there before I was born.

My mother last year was helping our neighbor get a birthday gift for her husband.  She did it with my mother so it would be a surprise for him. Over his birthday she ended up being in the hospital again, but yet my mom brought the gift so she would be able to give it  to him.  Here she was a woman who couldn't speak, giving her husband a birthday gift.  My mom expressed the interaction as a strong man in spirit who has never cried much had tears in his eyes as his wife gave him a simple birthday gift.  Something so simple can change everything.

With them moving in the next few days it is making me realize how things will be so drastically different once their house is empty and then when someone else moves in. But I know that they will be better off when there are there.  They will have someone watching over them, and everything will be safer. But things will never be the same.

But that's okay  :-)

because no matter what changes in this world, the sun will rise and set. The coffee will brew in the morning, and the world will keep on spinning.  We are all on a journey our choices that we make in our every day lives will take us forward.  It is up to us (and God) to figure out where that forward will take us.

So Marge and Dave, may God bless you on your next journey and may you never forget your neighbors who will always be here, helping you through. Because you will always be our neighbors. Love always