I Am Grateful

I am visiting a dear friend of mine who lives in New Bern, N.C. I worked with her husband for many years. He and I were close friends and I became close friends with his wife who I will call Miss B in the remainder of this post. John, my friend, passed away several years ago after a long and agonizing decline brought on by symptoms related to having been a smoker. Miss B and I have remained great friends and I have a standing invitation to visit with her at any time. Her family has taken me in as one of their own. They are close knit and often eat their evening meals together. All of them are in their late seventies to mid-eighties. All of them have many stories to tell of the area we live in and around. Time with them puts me in mind of the years when folk would sit at the table or in the living room and talk to each other.
Miss B lives in the historic district of New Bern. New Bern is the second oldest town in North Carolina and, arguably, the home of Pepsi Cola. Miss B's home was built in 1904 and is basically a shotgun house. It is as solid as a rock and comforting. I believe the strength in this home comes from both the construction and the love that has permeated the fabric of the home. I stay here when my husband is in the local hospital or, as in this case, because it comforts me. Miss B spoils me. I have learned to let her spoil me.
I called her yesterday and asked could I come visit for a couple of nights. She said yes without hesitation and began making plans for our visit immediately.
There are people who have come and gone in my life who brought something into my life that sustained me and lifted me up and over difficult times. Miss B and her family are those kind of people. She and I love to reminisce about John. We talk of him often and tell the same stories over and over again. Miss B and I loved him so much and he loved us. He found a great deal of joy in our nagging him and threatening to tell on him. When he passed away I realized what a huge place he held in my heart. Like myself he was quirky and given to coloring outside the lines of convention. He was humble and, as I found out later, far deeper than I imagined.
Paintings hang in their living room that John painted. I am convinced he was a high functioning autistic. I knew him for years before I knew he painted. It took him two years to paint one picture because he did intense research to ensure he represented the subject matter accurately. One of his paintings has a forest with pine straw on the ground, grass pushing through the pine straw, trees full of leaves  and a variety of other plant life. Every blade of grass is individually painted, every leaf on the trees is individually painted. The effect is exquisite in detail. It defies imagination. He used an old pencil drawing he found in a book as the source of his painting. He changed the trees in the painting because the trees in the pencil drawing were not indigenous to the area portrayed in it.
I could go on and on and maybe I will one day. John was a man within a man within a man. I learned so much about him at his funeral. I learned things I would never have guessed. Wonderful things. Tender things. He never mentioned them. He was that humble in his response to his many amazing life choices outside of work.
And yet, he was a conspiracy theorist who would go off on a tangent in a skinny minute and talk it through for hours. He was naïve of the technical world. Like many men his age he never trusted computers or their output. He refused to learn beyond a certain point and taught himself what he felt he needed to do on a computer. This made him the subject of a number of jokes. I don't know if he ever caught on because he stayed on track about the stupid computers and why should he use them and how "they" could see "us" and hear "us" over the computer even if we were not using the it at the time. Yet he developed a detailed catalog of a large variety of aircraft parts, their names and assigned part numbers. He did this on  a computer along with small pictures for demonstration purposes. This was awesome but in no way meant that he planned to learn anything further about the computer and the systems we utilized.
So now I am sitting at the computer in the home he resided in since the 1960's and I am certain that he highly approves. Anything that made Miss B happy made him happy. He lived for her happiness.
Miss B and I have learned to live with his absence but we do not see the time when it will feel natural to us. We talk of him often. We laugh at stories of him and at times we believe he is nearby grinning and feeling happy that we are happy.
Tomorrow I will drive the 30 plus miles back home. I made a good choice when I called and asked could I visit. Love given freely and without reservation is deeply healing. I return home having been gifted a wee healing from my friend who loves me freely and without reservation. I am grateful.