Happy Girl

Saturday, Ginny and I packed the car with garden tools and headed to our youngest daughter’s new home to clean the yard for her.

This is the first whole house Patricia has ever lived in by herself; she’s been an apartment dweller until now. She fell in love with this new place and I helped her move in earlier in the week.

Now, the joys of home ownership have burst in her heart. She’s thinking about bird feeders and fountains and flowers and park benches for her yard.

Her very own yard!

She envisions hosting family cook outs and chatting over the fence with neighbors and a cat curled on the hearth.

But first…

The place doesn’t even have a hearth, but that’s a minor detail.

It’s been a long time since anyone who cared lived in that house. Discarded lumber, broken cinderblocks, tall weeds, a tumbled down fence, an outside faucet missing a handle, a shed that needs tearing down — that sort of thing needs to be faced first.

Ginny and I devoted our day to the weeds and door locks and carting trash out to the curb while Butterfly Patricia flitted here and there unpacking pictures, arranging potted plants, placing knickknacks in discovered niches — nesting.

It was such a joy to watch her.

Few things make a dad happier than to see a grown child coming into his or her own.

Sometimes the duty of a father is to make his kids happy; it’s equally his duty to sometimes make them unhappy.

Saturday was one of those happy times and I relished it.

I can’t remember seeing Patty so joyous since she was a tiny little girl on a Christmas morning.

What a delightful day — though I spent a significant portion of it shoveling up dog shit from the previous owner’s pit bull.

That’s the sort of things dad’s do.

One of my best day’s ever -- and I have a whole lot of happy days under my belt.

After coming through a very bad patch, my little girl is happy.

She's getting settled.

Thanks be to God.

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Earlier this morning I posted a comment on Sweet & Sour Jane’s Blog at http://www.emaleejayne.com/ . Later, it occurred to me that I hardly ever mention movies in my own postings, they just don’t play a very big roll in my life. But I thought my comment to Jane might make a stand-alone blog posting of my own, so here it is:

There was a made for tv movie called Griffin & Phoenix staring Peter Faulk that touched me.. He and the female star, whose name I forgot, meet in a doctor’s office where they learn they each have cancer. The two strangers decide to make the most of the life they have left.

Such a bittersweet love story. Such fun. So sad.

The movie aired once years ago then disappeared without a ripple.

I thought it was the best movie ever, but apparently not everyone has my taste in stories.

I seldom comment but I enjoy reading about you and Slizzy in your posts often.