My Miracle Year: A Long Time Ago

"People come and then they go, and

That's just the way it goes.

Listen to what we know - like water

We shall flow back to the ocean in

The body of the Lord.

Welcome home. Time to reap what

You sow. Time is overwhelming.

I just hope there's time for everything."

Kan'Nal: Dreamwalker, Time

(To the left: back row from the left, me & Sandy, front row, baby? & my brother Steve) The last time I’d seen Sandy was at my brother Steve’s 3^rd or 4^th birthday when we were living with my paternal grandparents in Minnesota. At the time, Sandy lived with Grandma & Grandpa Husom and they brought her to the birthday celebration. That’s the night Grandma Husom sprained her ankle badly sliding on an icy step. We didn’t know it then but she had very little time left. That might have been the last time I saw her.

A couple of years later, Steve and I moved back to the West Coast after our father’s third marriage. He preferred that we have no ties to my mother’s family. We didn’t know why. And then Sandy’s father kidnapped her; she was never to see her mother again or have any contact with her family. Our grandparents mortgaged their farm trying to get her back. They were unsuccessful.

And now I was looking at Sandy’s email. Through all the moves Steve and I made growing up on the West Coast (I attended 14 schools in 11 years), the one constant was my mother’s picture albums of her family and the few additional pictures of family that had been taken after she died but before we left Minnesota.

One of those pictures was Steve’s birthday. I’d always point and say, “That’s my cousin Sandy. Her mother was my mother’s sister. She is the oldest of the cousins and I’m the second.” And that was pretty much that.

To be continued…