God bless everyone of you who reads my blog. I hope you are at peace with God and with yourself. It is a great feeling! I have been in both places, at peace and not at peace. When I get away from where I should be, I always try to find my way back to God's honey bowl of obedience.

I caught this little guy in the picture above, stealing nectar from my husband's flowers. Everything was so sunny and bright around him, he almost didn't show up in the picture. I have had days like that. Things were going so good that it seemed like nothing bad could ever happen again. Those times in our lives just don't last long enough.

The family that I grew up in had some unusual ways. Things were always tough and times were usually hard, but we laughed about the silly things. Like the day when we were kids and my momma broke my dad's horse, Smoky.


Smoky needed breaking, but Dad had not been able to stick with him long enough to get the job done. It took most of Dad's time to feed a houseful of kids. Mom didn't mean to take on the job, she did it quite by accident.

Smoky was standing close to the barn trying to avoid the cold wind blowing, when Mom decided to go get some dried peas that she had stored in a big barrel in the barn. Dressed in a heavy coat and head scarf, she made a wide circle around Smokey to avoid his sharp hooves. She made her way to the pea barrel in the corner. When she bent over to scoop up a pan of dried peas, she fell into the barrel.

Only Old Smoky knows how Mom looked as she came rolling out the barn door with the pea barrel rattling behind her. Her scarf and coat flying in the cold wind, and the barrel and trail of peas, scared that horse out of his wits. My brothers tell how Smoky ran and bucked and kicked until he just plain wore his meanness out. After that (according to my brothers) he was broke to ride.

Last week my siblings and I had an unusual day. We all drove over one hundred miles to have lunch together, before my oldest brother had a very somber appointment with the kind of doctor we call a specialist. We all sat together at a long table and ate while we laughed about things we remembered from long years ago. Dad and Mom have been gone for years, but they would have enjoyed the bittersweet day that we shared. Mom would have even laughed with us about her barrel of peas experience.

After lunch we still had a smile on our faces as 6 of us trooped into the doctors office and waited while our brother went through lots of test. Laughter doesn't make bad news better, it just softens the blows that life deals us sometimes.

Some months back a small child came to stay with us for awhile. She was a tiny child and worried about her family, especially a younger sibling. I overheard her tell someone, "that is Nana. She laughs alot." She was talking about me and that made my heart swell. She was having a very difficult day at one point. She looked at me with worry in her eyes, and said, "laugh Nana."

Proverbs 17:22 "A merry heart does good like a medicine." Smile every time you can, you never know who needs a lift.