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Shoo Fly Pie

Glistening sun across waving fields of corn.  Picture perfect red barns.  Gardens of leafy greens hugging square, white houses.  Crisp dresses and black trousers billowing in the breeze on sturdy, long clotheslines.  Long beards and bonnets in black buggies behind trotting horses clip clop down the lanes.  It's another world.  A place where people value hard work, each other, the process... the togetherness of life.  I breathe in the peace.

We have come to escape our world.  A brief reprieve from the place of our pain.  In still moments one or the other of us will let out a long sigh or notice a tear sneaking from the corner of an eye that dares to look back.  We eat shoo fly pie and cry and kiss babies as we make our way across this beautiful country- Amish country.   But people love to ask if the twins are our first so  we can't seem to leave our story behind.

I can't believe in 3 days it will be one year.  How is it possible that on a perfectly sunny, happy day like today she left me?  Have you ever imagined packing and going on a trip and then coming home with only your bags and not your child?  I have... turned the "if only's" over a million and one times.   Ultimately no one knows if those seemingly small every day decisions are saving you from tragedy or dooming you to it as you make them or if the death would have come anyway... as if predetermined.

I remember crying on the couch surrounded by my immedite family in the dark hours of the morning a few days after the accident.  Sleep was impossible, and they stroked my hair as I howled that I could not do this- that it was just too hard.  I could not live out all the long days and years ahead of me without her... a dark prison sentence.

One year into the sentence  I still feel the sharpness in my chest, but not all the time.  The dark heaviness is no longer pinning me down.  It still stabs through me often, but I can walk. I can see the beauty of Amish country and hope for the beauty of heaven.  I can breathe through the pain and see through the tears.  Thanks to many, many prayers... and rainbow toes. I know now that the long years only pass one minute at a time, and more than ever, now, I want to live in the minute.  I cannot go back, and I cannot skip ahead.  But I can rub my wet cheeks on tiny chubby ones and make this minute count.  After all, I don't know what the next one will bring.  Do you?

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