For many years after my daddy died it was just my mother and me.  I started my petsitting business and was especially thankful for the work around and on the holidays.  It forced me to get out and I would bring Mama along with me (who no longer drove.)  Together we would make my rounds visiting dogs, cats, the finned, and the feathered.  It kept us from feeling so lonely.  She loved to ride around looking at the Christmas lights and seeing all the decorations.  Thanksgiving was hard I must confess as I would drive by and look at all the shiny, happy families through the windows as they celebrated.  Neither one of us cooked because it was just the two of us and I was working so much we would just go out most of the time.  For years I spent so long being defensive over our lives’ circumstances.  I was 28 and would be changed forever the day my father died.  With startling clarity I realized God had blessed us so much having our precious family of three.  We were so close and trying financial times only brought us closer.  My business made me feel so good being appreciated by others as they went off to see their families while I took care of their four-legged ones.  Everyone likes to feel valued.  My father’s absence is still a hole in my heart, and my mother’s death still does not seem real after over two years.  But God has been gracious, allowing me to meet and marry my handsome husband and blessing us with our precious little girl.  Sitting outside tonight enjoying a cigar I took this picture.  I could look inside this home and be proud it was my own.  Better still I knew I had a beloved husband and cherished child sleeping peacefully inside it.  One of the women whom I have always admired the most, the deaf-blind American author and lecturer Helen Keller, said, “What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.”  As I have grown older I realize “it” was there all along; I just needed to discover I could only find it by looking in.