for the love

Traditionally speaking (in my own personal opinion of course) I smell summer when I get a whiff of freshly cut grass. Today I'd like to induct a few more favorite smells that for me will always = summer. 1. Honeysuckle. One thing many people probably do not know about me (because I do not tell many people) is that as a child I had a habit of eating flowers. I cannot explain why I did this, only that I remember seeing a beautiful and rather large white flower growing in our backyard in Texas, and I got hungry. I plucked a petal off, put it in my mouth, and chewed. It was good. And then I ate the rest of it. Afterwards, I remember feeling distinctly immoral about the whole affair, and decided I should not do it again. But do it again I did. My best friend lived about 4 houses down from me and I would often walk down there in the summer time and we would play in the ally or in one of our backyards, or one of our rooms. On one particular day I remember being at her house and knowing t...

My sister started blogging a little more than a year ago. I started reading it about 4 or 5 months after she started. I didn't even know what a blog was, let alone that she could write html. That was just one of the first things that her blog taught me about her. Over time I began to read her updates daily, and I looked forward to the stories she would tell and the pictures she would post about her kids - my niece and nephew. I also learned many other things about her that I just never knew or considered about my big sister of 28 years. Like her views on politics, Christianity, the growth of her faith, her favorite things, things she hates, and so on and so forth. For me, her blog has been a portal into her life that I had never entered before. Maybe I should say here that she only lives one mile away from me. And I see her and the kids almost every other day. And yet that speaks to the breakdown in communication that I either never knew existed, or I had just become comfortable wi...