Faith

I live in a beautiful five bedroom house.  What an amazing thing to say, I think as I write this, and the house sits on an acre lot with a swimming pool and a treehouse and a creek that flows behind it.  Beautiful deer and birds and squirrels greet me everyday.  I have a grove of redwood trees and flowers galore.  How blessed am I, is a thought that goes through my mind often.  After my husband died, my children, naturally at 15 and 17, wanted to be out with their friends, so I found myself rattling around alone in this big house. The house itself is comforting.  It has the floor plan of a traditional doll house.  If you took the exterior wall off the back it would look exactly like the doll house I had growing up on the farm.  Symmetrical rooms, upstairs and downstairs, and a stair case in the middle.   The house is painted a creamy white with black shutters, a big front door in the center, and twin black flower pots full of pink and white flowers sit on each side.

Even though, I myself was an executive with a start up software company that would eventually be sold to Intel, I still had to beg my husband to buy me this house, because it was in extreme disrepair.  At the time he would have done anything, including buying me a life size dilapidated doll house, to make me happy.

On the day we saw the house for the first time, I was just nine weeks pregnant with the beautiful Siena, and Paris, the apple of our eye, was home with our nanny appropriately named Elizabeth Blackwell who spoke six languages.  We bought the house “as is” with no contingencies, and to say it was a total fixer upper is putting it mildly.  It needed new walls, new floors, new ceilings, new bathrooms, new landscaping, a new roof, and new windows.  It took four months of renovations before we could even move in.  My husband threatened several times to tear the whole thing down and start over.

I think back to those days now, as so much of this life for me is ending.  I remember how much faith I had in all of it, and how my faith has always allowed me to smoothly sail through the many ups and downs of raising a family and married life.  My faith has been a constant companion throughout my life.  And on this day and the many others that has lead up to it, my faith has been with me and has filled my prayers with gratitude for the countless blessings of my life.

Yesterday morning I had breakfast with my husband’s best friends, Dan and Jeff.  They look at me with kind eyes and ask what I’m going to do now.  And I don’t know, but I do know that God will guide my steps as he has always done, and we will be fine.  I have perfect faith that we will be more than fine.

I have two cats, a dog, a rabbit and two almost grown kids who inhabit what was once, and will remain, a very happy home.