Did you miss me yesterday? Sorry this is a day late- we had BFFs from Wyoming here for a week and I didn’t want to spend even a few minutes not enjoying their company.
I’ve mentioned my friend Lula before, I think. She and her husband were our closest neighbors (about a third of a mile away) when we moved out to our country house east of Cheyenne. Lula welcomed me with a pound of bacon from one of her own pigs, a dozen eggs that she’d gathered that morning, and some wild flowers from her garden. As we got to know each other, she taught me how to can carrots and green beans and make pieced quilts, and she shared cuttings of peonies and raspberries.
From early on, I saw her as a kind of ‘mom’, mine was already gone and Lula’s gentle, old fashioned (pioneer) view of life became a wise whisper that spoke loudly to me. Like so many times when God gifted me with an older woman in my life, Lula and I developed a strong and precious bond. We’d known each other several months when the conversation turned to birthdays and we discovered that my birthday and her daughter Sari’s birthday were the same day and just one year apart. It was that fact that encouraged Lula to share with me one of the darkest times in her life. When Sari was very little, Lula, Sari and her brother and Lula’s husband were driving into Cheyenne to deliver eggs. That was long before cars had seat belts. Somehow, their car drifted into the oncoming lane just at the top of a small hill, and they crashed into another car head on. Lula’s husband was killed and so was Sari. Their son was injured, but not horribly, and Lula had a broken pelvis among other injuries. In just an instant, a family was decimated and lives were changed.
By the time Lula and I were friends, the accident and Sari’s death were carefully healed and year-faded scars. Time and faith and life had gone on. Lula healed physically from her injuries and found ways to go on with her life. She married Gene after a few years and started a second family to add to the first and discovered that she could be happy again.
The last birthday that I celebrated with Lula before her memory began to fade, she gave me a sweet gift and told me that she felt that God had brought us together so that she could better imagine what Sari may have grown up to be had she lived. After the wickedness of age and dementia had taken over much of Lula’s mind and she’d been moved to a care facility, when I’d visit, sometimes she’d know me and sometimes she’d call me Sari. In either case she was glad to see me and I was glad to be there even though it was painful.
I don’t want this to be a sad story. Lula was a gift to me. I came back home to live in Wyoming and God gave me a replacement mom to treasure and He gave her a lost daughter to cherish. Beyond that, I can’t list how I blessed her, but I can make a list of how I am a better and richer human being because this quiet little farm woman. Here are three important life lessons I know because of Lula: 1. People should never leave your home empty handed. (jam, fresh bread, eggs, a cookie, a plant cutting, a magazine article she thought I’d like. Never, Never did I leave her house empty handed.) 2. Never forget that God loves you and has your best in mind. (Even when it feels insurmountable, God’s grace is enough) 3. Laugh. (There is always some way to see beauty or humor in the day.)
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