Be an Angel

Here I am with my dad, when I couldn't have been more than a year old.



Below you will see my garden angel. I purchased her to commemorate my father's passing. I also planted a Crepe Myrtle tree, but we no longer live in the house where I planted it, so I'm really glad I bought this angel. Though she is very heavy she can be moved from place to place and wherever I take her, when I see her, I remember my father.

My father and I didn't know each other very well until the end of his life. My parents divorced when I was only two and it was a difficult divorce, as all divorces seem to be, for the children involved, at any rate. What I do remember about him is that he had a great sense of humor, even if it was a bit crude at times. I was familiar with his sense of humor, even as a small child, but became reacquainted with this side of him late in his life. I will be eternally grateful for the reconciliation that we were blessed to have only a couple of years before he passed.

He died in August of '98 and I suppose I could have saved this post for then, but I've been thinking a lot about him lately, and being out in the beautiful weather we've been having I pass by my angel quite a bit, my constant reminder of God's grace and my father's love, of which I wasn't certain until I was in my late forties. I never really believed he loved me until my Aunt June's funeral when he initiated a conversation that literally changed my life. As we talked he was holding an orange in his hands, that he had picked from a tree whose branches hung directly over where we were sitting. By the time he finished telling me of his love for me he had completely squeezed the juice out of that orange and it was dripping down his hands onto the ground. This picture of my nervous father trying to get across to me that he did love me became indelibly marked in my brain forever, and I'm so thankful for this memory.