IT'S JUST A...

 If you walk around our house…and I say this candidly…you probably wouldn’t give a second thought to some of the things you see.

You’d probably miss that piece of wood in the corner…if you walk by a little to quick…

and even if you noticed it you might think…”it’s just a stick.”

In the corner of our kitchen…that piece of furniture…over there…chances are you’d pass by thinking…”it is just a chair.”

Your eyes might find the pen and ink drawing…if they find it at all…

and even if they do you might think…it’s just another picture on the wall.”

If you happen into our laundry room…you might give that weathered old collar a look…

chances are you’d say, “It’s just an old collar”…hanging on that hook.

And you’d be correct in your assumptions for how often we see things as we find them…but the meaning is not in what we see… but in what we see behind them.

That old collar was our dog Whitman’s who would match me stride for stride…

as we walked together every morning…until the day he died.

My father drew that self-portrait when he was a young man…I think around 22

It’s a nice remembrance of the man…now that his life is through.

Deborah’s father made that little chair and it rests in our corner because…

It serves as a constant reminder of the kind of man he was.

And that was Deborah’s mom’s walking stick in the corner for all to see…carved by Deborah’s dad from the branch of an old orange tree.

But it is more than a decoration…it’s not just there for idle talk.

It reminds Deborah of her mom every morning…when we take our walk.

It’s funny isn’t it…the things we might not even notice when we walk through someone’s door…

We might see just a stick, a chair, a drawing, a strap…

when they are really so much more.