Do we make a.........

.
...........Difference here? Do any of the words written change the future?

Allow me to spin a little tale if you don't mind.

I was raised in the country. On a small dairy farm owned by my parents. We might not have had a lot of money, but we sure ate good looking back at it in my memory. Hogs that we raised on corn we grew and milk that we couldn't sell. Beef raised on grass and feed we mostly raised. Vegetables raised in a garden that I hated to work in as a child. New clothes and shoes each year before school started. My parents only graduated high school, but wanted us to go further than they did. We would have too, if we hadn't wanted to leave home so bad to strike out on our own. Thinking that we could certainly do better than they. Because there was the reality of a hard life at work at home. Looking back, I'm not sure it could have been better, but we might have responded to it more intelligently.

I always wanted my way and more. After only 3 months of college, I married the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. Mostly I still see that image, although only in my minds eye. Sometimes I say half in jest that we've been married 20 happy years.........
..not too bad out of almost 40. And maybe I'm counting a few too many. She's tried to rid herself of me many times, but I was too stubborn to leave, or maybe just didn't have enough sense. But we have a fine set of children and grandchildren that we both love.

I elected to join the army after a year and a half of marriage. This was in '69. I received my draft notice the day I came home from signing the papers to enlist. There was no doubt that I'd go off to war, only whether I'd manage to get to fight it with my preferred weapon, an AH1-G Cobra gunship. When my orders to 'nam came she was near term in her first pregnancy. I left when the daughter was 5 days old. I look back and see how that must have seemed like I abandoned them both. Starting from the day I left to go to basic.

But, I survived to return. To watch that little blonde curly haired little girl charm the hearts of the Germans at my next duty assignment. Shortly after leaving that assignment for Washington State, my father died, and I resigned my warrant to come home and take over the farm. Just as the army did, it required more of me than I gave to her. And like many viet vets I felt betrayed by my own country and it caused me more than a little hurt which sometime found release by violent treatment of the cows and vulgar language in an almost constant stream. And I realized that I was missing a component of my life which I shed in my teens. A religious component.

So I sought for a direction to travel in. And I found one. After much searching.
Much prayer, until one night I woke to find a strange man standing at the foot of my bed, 2:10 in the morning, my wife sound asleep on the other side of the king sized bed. And through mind meld or something, he told me to accept Christ and be baptized. Which I did 2 days later, with my wife off at work and the kids at school. Says something about how close we were doesn't it. I was active for a while, but none of my family wanted to go with me, and pretty soon a man gives up trying to drag the mule to water only to have them not drink.

10 years later, I was running a small sawmill at our place in the middle of the woods, when a man drove up in a battered blue van. Said he was from the church and was looking for, as it turned out, me.

Now I hadn't been to church in years and had moved 80 miles from our old home. But somehow my name had been sent to the local branch and here he was. We talked of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and at last I got around to telling him of the nocturnal visitor so many years before. Because it still remains more vivid than almost anything I've ever done. I had often wondered why that visitor came to me when most people never had that experience. And I wondered if there was some great work that I was to do. The man simply looked at me and said "he wanted you in church". And so I go, not as often as I should now I guess. But for 12 years I felt that I was touching peoples lives in a positive way. And I could sometimes see the hurt on my wifes face as I would get ready on Sundays, and leave her for 4 to 6 hours. But she didn't complain, only endured.

So now I spend more Sundays with her, but I wonder, will we ever have again that closeness we had in our youth, when we clung together because it was us against the world.

I started this post intending to rant about a post over at LL’s, but I guess I needed to see what was under the Kudzu today, and trust me, I didn't look as deep as I should have.

Maybe another day.