5th Saturday, snow, plans with dear friend and butterflies.....

Wow - the 5th Saturday of the year 2010 and next to the last day of the first month - whew - that went by quickly. We finally got some snow and it is pretty. Sadly we have had sleeting and freezing rain most of the day so not really good for playing in (as if I were even thinking about going out there!). Good day to work on Big D's books but so far haven't started. :-) I did get caught up with a dear old friend who saw me on-line and has been trying to get me to visit her and her hubby down at the coast for several years now. Finally she said - "this weekend - come down and we will go in service together". I talked with Big D while we were on-line and it is now a definite plan. I love definite plans - a real goal to work toward. I will leave Thursday morning and probably not come home until Monday morning because I really want to go to her meeting on Sunday and it isn't until 1pm. We are going to meet for lunch on Thursday in a quaint little coastal town before you get to where she lives for lunch and some shopping and I may hook up with two other friends down there at the same time! Exactly what I needed - a definite plan! We have known each other for years but only started getting close (other than our kids-her two beautiful daughters and my children-being friends) several weeks before they moved down East. I really love this woman and her family and am looking forward to some up and down time with her. It is so funny because I had just been skimming through the Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips and the smaller Crazy Sexy Cancer Survivor that I picked up from the library but have kept putting off really getting into. I have already extended the due date once so decided I needed to at least skim them to see if I wanted to invest. I think I will go on eBay to see if this one is available. It has pages like a work-book and maybe that will help me in my determination to be more pro-active. We'll see. As I skimmed some of the pages and read a few of the experiences, it made me think of my young niece Starr who died as a result of complications from medication she had to take most of her young life for Rheumatoid Arthritis. Once I get my scanner fixed, hopefully I'll be able to post a picture of this beautiful young girl with white blonde hair and huge blue eyes who endured unrelenting pain over her entire body from the time she was about 4 years of age. She was 23 when she died on January 18th. She would have turned 35 this past November. Her life was hard on so many levels and at times her disease along with severe family issues (some of which came about because of her chronic and debillitating illness causing fractures in everyone's life) made her hard too. She wasn't hard during the last time I saw her looking so happy, radiantly beautiful and totally enjoying herself at my son's wedding a few months before she died. She loved my son very much and was so happy to be with him for this important occasion. She even came to our room to help him get dressed and danced with all his friends (even though she still had a cast on her leg) in a beautiful blue dress. She also enjoyed the rehearsal dinner and my son and his wife have a picture of her there with them. She also wasn't hard those few weeks before she died and called me from the hospital where she spent more time than any young person should have to. I heard the fear in her voice but they released her so we thought that once again, she would persevere. Sad to say, it wasn't to be. My brother-in-law wrote a beautiful poem for her entitled by her first name but I'll call it Golden Butterfly for this Blog. It was read at her Memorial. The last little quote is super-special between all our children and their uncle who wrote this poem.

Golden Butterfly

A golden butterfly landed on our window sill, we raised the window for it to come in-if it will.
And it came in so beautiful, we wanted to sing, then we noticed it had a broken wing.

How long can a butterfly fly, if it has a broken wing?
Twenty-three years with many tears and a lot of suffering.

Starr's childhood sickness was supposed to take her long before it did.
The doctors thought that she would die while still a little kid.

But this butterfly with the broken wing, taught us all how to live.
She had to struggle through everything, but was always ready to give.

She clung to her friends and family too, she didn't want to say good-bye.
She wanted to get close to me and you, and now, we know the reason why.

Butterflies don't live very long, but they're beautiful while they're here.
It saddens us when they're gone, but they leave us with good cheer.

Most dogs have two eyes, but Starr's Bojo had only one.
And she treated him like a valuable prize, and they both had a lot of fun.

We'll miss our golden butterfly, she was a special one.
We'll miss her dropping by, just to have some fun.

We'll miss her in the Spring time, when butterflies land on our sill.
And we'll think of her everyday, yes we always will.

Perhaps some day we'll meet again, and laugh and hug and sing.
Especialliy when we understand, she'll no longer have a broken wing.

And to her cousins whose tears now trickle, remember always --
"Once upon a dime, there was a nickle"

Thinking of you baby girl......and thanking you dear Wayne for a beautiful poem.