I strode around Mom’s property in northern Minnesota—a piece of land closer to Canada than to Iowa—on Monday, September 18, 2023, the seventeenth anniversary of Dad’s passing.
The day was in the low eighties, an unusual temperature for a place known for the possibility of frost in September. A lover of summer, I thrill to a warm fall, certain I feel God’s love most in the heat.
I rounded the southwest corner of the yard and entered “the wedding aisle,” a term someone had once used for the neat row of trees back there. A stroll down the aisle always feels like a triumphal procession; nature watches me, and I smile back. And so it went that day too.
Just beyond the midpoint of the path, I stopped. Turning, I gazed back to the start and snapped a picture of my past.
Like my life, I thought. Over halfway there.
I aimed my steps forward again and clicked a photo of my future. I moved into it. A freshly-shorn field, post white-unto-harvest, loomed ahead. My destination.
Mom’s dogs—the three-legged one and his younger friend—bounded next to me, sometimes stealing seconds to sniff the trees, other times ripping toward new fascinations.
I came to the end of the aisle and captured another picture. The work done; the harvest gathered in.
Life is golden.
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