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The “Angelkeep Journals” column has the rare opportunity to be published on the last day of 2009. “The Last Word,” so-to-speak! This column, like others, thrives on the special, sometimes odd, events of real life. Based on that premise, this New Years Eve column will focus not on resolutions for the future, but milestones of the four seasons of 2009 past.
Winter is the season when Angelkeep typically goes dormant, sleeps, dies, or at the very least is dreary. Color is extinct, with the exception of red birds and evergreens. It is the darkest of weeks. It was in the midst of the 2009 winter that goodbye was forced upon the spark and life of Gwen’s mother, Mary Esther.
The bereavement made the year’s winter even more of a test of endurance, but also shaped a heightened vigor to spring as it arrived. Upon spring’s advent, there was evidence of a couple of tree deaths through the winter. New life emerged between the dead roots of the lost trees. In Mary’s passing, eternal life began.
Newness in spring is exciting to see in both plants and animals. The highlight of the 2009 spring was Mother Robin’s remodeling of an abandoned nest on the garage downspout. She laid eggs, and sat as faithfully as Horton the Elephant to hatch her brood. The day after the robin fledglings abandoned the nest and assimilated into the Angelkeep robin population, a nest with three cardinal eggs was found in the rose trellis.
Likewise, Mrs. Cardinal brooded. Through the mated cardinal pair’s combined feeding labors, two new cardinals soon joined the Angelkeep spring color spectacle. The third egg never hatched.
Babies (bunnies, mink, fawns, goslings, and more) filled the months preceding summer with ample nature enchantment.
Summer began with a steady flow of additional Angelkeep visitors—but in this season it was humans. Family arrived, one after another, young and old, in a flow of connecting family mini-reunions. When our own clan finally left Angelkeep, a new family appeared to pick up the excitement.
The Angelkeep Journals writer was given the opportunity to get involved with the Nuck’s. That family originally settled in Huntington County where some yet live. The original Nuck family log home is preserved by the Huntington Forks of the Wabash. An invitation was accepted and illustrations for children’s books about the Nuck home began taking shape at Angelkeep.
The books’ author, Dr. Evelyn Priddy, was once a Bluffton resident and teacher (who just happened to have once been a teacher to one the 2009 summer Angelkeep visiting clan members). She and the Nuck family became the second family group connected to the summer. Angelkeep felt adopted by the Huntington group.
As the Angelkeep animal families grew, so did the family association of Angelkeep’s human pair. Drawings were improved. Material was edited until all was ready for the publisher. With that point’s arrival, so had autumn emerged.
It was a big summer, but fall would suddenly prove to be huge. Titanic!
Ten-Two-Nine will now be as memorable at Angelkeep as Nine-One-One is to us all. Angelkeep’s columnist’s heart stopped. Blood clot! Heart attack! A life race.
The outcome was positive. It is nearly impossible to explain to another human the physical and emotional effects of the heart episode as well as the aftermath.
Effectively describing emotions even after a successful hospital heart operation is as likely as an Angelkeep cricket explaining to a human its emotion from the music it plays loudly over Angelkeep through many summer and fall weeks.
Understanding why one family member survives and another is lost, why one tree leafs no longer, while others sprout excessive limbs; or why two cardinal eggs hatch, while a third lays lifeless; is beyond intellectual capacity. God is in control.
New Years Eve will hear no resolutions on this night from Angelkeep. Beginning tomorrow, each 2010 day will be taken one at a time, and enjoyed to its fullest, at least every day that God allows.
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their back yard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
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