Jake

Did you ever have something happen to you that was so sad that you were sure your heart would never recover? That maybe you would never laugh or be lighthearted again? Mama's cancer has made my heart heavy.

When Trevor laughs, it is innocent and care free. I smile and wonder if the wounded places in my heart will ever heal enough to laugh like that? Or maybe just be forgotten for for a minute. It happened that day on the mountain when I saw the iris garden. I was ready for it to happen again. I needed it to happen again. I said to God, " I just want to laugh, can I please just laugh."

We were on our way to Mobile to see Whitney in a play. We stopped at Priesters Pecans, a shop kinda like Cracker Barrel but the main thing is the pecans. They even have free samples. I always go and look at the Life Is Good stuff and see if they have just the right shirt for me. Then I saw it, and my heart relaxed and I went to a sweet place of summer fun and belly laughs, of sunburned cheeks and swimsuit that I looked just fine in. A place where sleep came easy as I whispered secrets in the night to my best friend, my sister.

The shirt is blue, of course, and it has a stick figure of Jake jumping off a dock. All my young summers were spent near or in water. It was me. $25 for a T-shirt hurt my feelings a little so I left it there, but I thought about it several times over the weekend and every time I smiled all the way to my toes. On the way home we stopped at the same store again. The shirt was still there and the cotton pickin' thing was still $25. I left it there again.

I kept thinking about that shirt and what I felt when I saw Jake sailing off that dock. My skinny, mischievous little Debbi, of way back then, smiled every time and suddenly I had an idea. Trevor and I had an art project the next day.




Now I see Jake every time I take a shower, or sometimes I go in there just to look. Maybe I should have painted "him" in a bikini.

Here is another thing that makes me smile. My hidden bag of Oreos. So if I need just one after a meal or something like that, there is always one there. You might wonder how I keep it secret in a house of lots of people. We'll I can't tell you, cause then it wouldn't be a secret.

I'm gonna go now. I'm gonna go put some finishing touches on my art project. I think there needs to be some friendly rays on the sun, just like little Debbi used to draw when summers were long and fireflies were everywhere. When she played mermaid underwater at the lake and sometimes....she flew, like Jake.