Hello there, friends! Goodness, that was a bit of an unexpected blogging break! If you’d come here in the past couple days looking for the usual Monday fare, you may have been surprised to find no blog at all (unexpected and scary, to say the least)! Thank you to those of you who emailed or messaged me, letting me know of the problem or asking me what was up. My blogging host platform, Typepad, experienced a DDoS attack, which adversely affected many blogs for a couple of days (something, which, thankfully has never happened before). I’m thankful that their team worked tirelessly to fix the problems, and that you and I are back here together in one of my favorite places on the internet.
And now, let’s just fall in step with the post that’s been waiting in the wings …
I passed the open shed door on a sunny afternoon, and there he was, that boy sitting on that high stool at the workbench, sawing, sawing, sawing on an old scrap of wood. Blonde sawdust slowly sifted to the floor as one end was cut off, and then the other, so he’d be left with the nice part in the middle.
Leaving the notion of paper, markers, scissors and glue behind, he’d gone in search of a medium more fitting to a boy, and to a man.
The saw stopped for just a second as he looked over his shoulder at me and said he was working on a present.
For Dad.
It was a special welcome home, he said, for our aviator, who’d been away for all those days, and who was coming home very, very soon.
There was just time enough to fashion a welcome that would say so much more than simple words pencil-scrawled on plain old paper.
He cut, he sanded, and later at the dining table, he carved with the knives that his daddy used when he was a boy. He slicked it with varnished and let it dry.
Then, he waited with giddy anticipation, as the last few days dropped away one by one.
And on that day when his daddy walked through the door, the boy was standing tall with playful eyes, a full-on grin, and a welcome home wrap-hidden behind his back.
.