Gratefulness For Longtime Friendships

We can so easily forget to be grateful for those people in our lives that are always there for us. We begin taking them for granted and forget what a gift they are.  I am blessed to have a friend that I met in second grade who I still am in contact with. We still call each other our 'best' friend, even though we don't see each other often. But when you have a friend of over 50 years, it is a special thing.

I don't really remember how we became friends since it was so long ago. We were opposites in many ways. She was tall and I was always the shortest in my class. But for some reason we found out we were alike in many ways and spend the rest of our school years making up secret clubs, fun stories about people we knew and having many adventures together. Even when I moved away in high school, we saved our babysitting money to call each other on Saturday night when it was cheaper to call (remember those days?). We competed on many things such as who would tan faster, who could read a book faster, who got better grades. I usually won on the tanning and book reading but my friend always won with the grades. She was just more dedicated to that than I was. Last year she sent me all the letters I wrote her over the years with comments about certain events we both forgot. They were fun to read after so many years and see what kind of person I was back in high school.

We still get together when I am in the town I grew up in. She has never moved more than 25 miles from where we grew up. I have moved many times in my life and now live over a 1,000 miles from her.  But when we get together, we are those same girls that kicked our shoes off at recess and had to write on the chalkboard for the rest of recess 'I will not kick my shoes off' 100 times. We know what each other are going to say and laugh before we even finish saying it. We each hold the memories of the girls we used to be and still are in our thoughts. We joke that we will be the old age home together and drive each other crazy. But it is precious to have that friendship and the many others I have made over the years.

Look at your friends and say a quiet thank you for those shared memories and special friendships.

I Am Grateful for Sight

This has been a year of some important changes in our life. My husband has been dealing with almost a year of surgery after surgery to repair his retina after a tear last August. He was the one with perfect vision while I have been wearing glasses most of my life. I always tried to explain what it was like to see without my glasses but he could never relate.  Now he is coming to terms with losing the sight in one eye permanently. With each surgery the hope of recovery of his sight became less positive. Now we know it will never be the same and any surgery now will be to hold off the complete loss of vision.

So now I am the one who drives and has to watch out for his blind side. It is an adjustment that we are still getting used to. He still has very good vision out of one eye but since the lost vision is on the left side, it makes driving tricky. I now realize how precious sight is and appreciate the glasses I wear to correct my vision. Sometimes it takes a loss to recognize the simple but important things we take for granted.

What is it you take for granted that would be difficult if you lost it? I am so amazed at stories of those who use their feet because they have no hands. Those who overcome the most severe injury to be a positive influence in the world. I hope we can be those kind of people as well. Don't wait until something happens to say thank you for what you already have.