08/16/2004 - 8:51 PM

The weekend with Matt's family was wonderful. In a very short amount of time, I feel like a member of the family that is always welcome, and the fact that they've started to ask me to help around the house is incredibly encouraging to me. In the short time I was there, we went shopping, visited Amish country, stopped at a pickle factory, spent a few hours at what quickly turned into a family reunion for Matt's dad's side of the family, attended a Southern Baptist church service, visited a cemetery, easily spent over an hour total petting the family cat (man, I miss having a cat around), installed a shelf in the laundry room, and ate a LOT of amazing food.

Matt's mom can cook up a storm, and she definitely gave me reasons to reconsider my love of Southern cooking. She made the most amazing sweet cream pie...this is one to give Squirrel X's recipes a run for their money. I promise I will post it next time, as I know several of you like to cook. It's so simple to make, and yet the only word I can use to describe it is "bliss".

However, the most powerful moment of the trip came when I was on the plane headed for Atlanta (yeah...Delta thought that was a reasonable connection point for going from Ft Wayne to Denver). Matt had printed out a letter that his dad wrote on advice of his VA counselor. In the matter of six pages, he had recapped a good chunk of his life, with the majority of the narrative covering his time in Vietnam. I am in awe...the man has seen more killing, suffering and pain in his lifetime than most of our entire families will ever experience. Now he deals with pain of the physical, mental and emotional kinds. He's distant from his family at times, he's clinically depressed, his weight is well above average, and his back causes him immense suffering on a daily basis. Add to that the recurring nightmares of his time in Vietnam, and the man has a hard time sleeping.

As I flew over a town that looked like it could be Ft Wayne, I was struck by how hard Matt's dad's life is, and will continue to be. His mom's life will probably be just as hard. They're going to need all the help that they can get, and although the siblings that live in Indiana can help them out, it's going to be tough, especially since they both have kids that they also need to take care of. That's why I'm going to suggest to Matt that once we have our ceremony next year, we start looking for a place to live further east, rather than buying a home here in Denver. We've kicked around the idea of eventually moving back closer to our families, although we're in agreement that we don't want to live in the same town. Indy, Cincinnati, and Pittsburg...we've talked about a bunch of places, but that was originally outside the five-year plan. In my mind, the ten-year plan just became the two-year plan.

We'll see what Matt has to say...

What I'm Listening To: Stacie Orrico - I Could Be the One

First Word That Comes To Mind: East

What I'm Currently Reading: