Thing I learned over these last few days in North Dakota:

I am not as long suffering as the Father, I do have a fuse and if you light it... well

Old Ghosts from long long ago know how to haunt you when you go back 40 years

I have not only German and Norwegian blood, but American Indian and am part Black (this from a dear relative of mine, but I'm not convinced although I was born on the Res)

Saying I'm sorry doesn't fix the broken heart

Christmas is what it is, but it isn't what the commercials say it should be. Too much Santa, not enough Jesus... and maybe that's as it should be.

I like nice decorations, I think garish overdone is crazy. The TV program re Decoration is goofy.

Going and coming is emotional both ways... saying goodbye, sometime with the awareness it is likely the last time, is hard, but the clock ticks

I'm glad I live where I do

There is no going home again, Thomas Wolfe was right

Our real home is in God, not a physical place. There is beauty everywhere but if you want to find satisfaction in beauty or place, you won't.

“From p. 40 of Signet Edition of Thomas Wolfe's _You Can't Go Home Again_ (1940):

Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.

The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change.

The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same.

All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.

The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again