Generations

"Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations." Ps. 90

He's new here.  Kitty-corner from us--the white house with the big elephant leaf tree outside.  She's saved the largest leaves; pressed between fifty-year old newsprint.  Now the leaves and the decaying newsprint that's held them, antique peanut butter jars, furniture, flooring....all is being cleared out----updated.

Her husband was out early summer, fall, and into winter, faithfully plucking each leaf off the lawn nearly as quickly as they fell...after he died a sad death, she kept up the chore.

Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world; from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

She, warm, soft, and so sensitive.  Always remembering my children's names.  Tearing up at the sight of a new life.  Weeping while watching a beautiful sunset.  And she misses her husband in a way that only lovebirds who've shared life together for sixty years could understand.

You turn men back to dust, saying "Return to dust, O sons of men."

The new boy is her great-grandson.  She's fallen one too many times and now resides in a community home.  Two generations later her offspring now fill her dwelling place of sixty years.  I talk with him in my yard, a bright-eyed boy just my boys' ages. 

We chat about his great-grandma...how she's living in a different place.  He says he thinks she moved because she missed his great-grandpa.  He doesn't understand.  But he does understand his sweet great-grandmother's words to him. 
"She says that I'm the one who made her great."

For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.