The Past Meets the Present with Presents!

from my art journal

Ernest and Maybell

We're almost at "ten months later," with insurance money in hand, in a new lovely home in a great neighborhood. There's food in the fridge and three dogs in the yard -- so our future is looking brighter since our Leilani Estates home was lost back in May last year

One of the more painful processes we faced was actually listing everything that we lost, room by room. But just who makes a list of their treasured library, collected over a lifetime? Yeah, that was a tough one. Also gone were all the amazing art treasures from around the world.  But perhaps some of the hardest losses to embrace were our wedding photographs (from mid 1980's) and our wedding rings -- Phil's was his dad's and mine was a sweet rose gold ring that was my great grandmothers!!

Santa Cruz wedding in our back yard
(My dress was covered in Hawaiian style Hibiscus)

When we past our 32 anniversary last year (in the same month we lost our home) Phil gave me was a beautiful birds' nest he had found, and with it came the his promise that we WOULD find our new nest eventually.

One of our dearest friends back in California sent Phil her mother's wedding band to give to me, along with a photograph of Ernest and Maybell. She also had one of our wedding photos -- one we didn't even remember giving to her!

Cosmologists and astrophysicists tell us that time is relative and can be "folded" - so in this blog entry we are folding time -- taking a tuck from the last century and the last year, folding it into our new present, with the understanding that that was then -- this is now -- and we are living in the moment of NOW!