Simple Gifts

My New Year's message today is called Simple Gifts, and it was inspired by Razzleberry, the newest family member. He's my orange buddy cat we found injured, starved and meowing in a drain pipe along the road a few weeks ago.

This morning he heard me typing in the office and meowed to come in.  After playing for about 10 minutes with his stuffed mouse - "Die, mouse, die! Ah-ha! I am Razzleberry, the fiercest hunter in the world!" - he stood on tiptoes and clawed at my jeans, begging for attention. I picked him up into my arms and was rewarded with deep baritone purrs that vibrated through my body as well as his. I hugged him gently in my arms, and he purred and nestled in.  He looked up at me with soft green eyes, purring and gently rubbing his face against my sleeve when I stopped cuddling him.

I leaned back in my office chair and gazed out the south-facing windows at the orchard trees.  Sparrows hopped about on the frost-coated roof while Pierre, our other cat, raced into the room to leap onto the bookcases under the window and follow their progress.  A hot cup of coffee steamed on the desk and the heater gently warmed my freezing space, preparing me for a full day of work ahead.

As I sat and looked down at Razzle, I was overwhelmed by waves of love for this beautiful golden-cream colored cat.  I thought of how only a few short weeks ago, he was not in my life.  I had no idea that one day while we were walking the dog we would find him, half starved, sick, infected leg and all.

I thought of someone's reaction to my story of saving Razzle.  When I talked to this person at Christmastime, he didn't say much to me on the phone after I told him of saving the sick cat - just said "Well, good luck with that."  My husband got on the phone with him and talked a while.  Later that night as we were walking the dog together, my husband said that the person on the phone had said gruffly, "If I'd found that cat I would have dumped him at the nearest animal shelter and been done with that."

Been done with that....Razzle purrs, stretches, rolls over on his back to give me his creamy-colored belly for pets.  He gets a silly grin on his face when he rolls onto his back, his fangs sticking out like Nibbler on Futurama.

Each day when we wake up, we don't know what paths life will give us. Each day new paths open before us. Sometimes they are wide and clear; the phone rings, and it is a job offer, or maybe a friend who needs consolation. The path is wide and clear; accept the job, listen and comfort your friend.

But on some days, the paths are neither wide nor clear. They are narrow or seem to branch into odd directions. One day this fall, a little crooked path opened up before me in my road of life.  I could take the path or leave it. I chose to take it.  I don't know whether Razzle will stay healthy or not.  I do my best with him. He has good veterinary care, excellent food, a warm bed to sleep in, cat toys to play with, a dog to harass and two humans who love him and cuddle him and play with him.  Other than that, it's not up to me.

He got plenty out of that chance meeting but I seem to have benefited more from his gifts.  He is the most affectionate little cat I have ever owned, even more affectionate than my old black cat, who loved nothing more than to sit in my lap all evening while we watched television together. Pierre is a funny cat and wickedly smart - he can, after all, open most of the doors inside the house, knows and responds to whistled commands, and plays leapfrog with the German shepherd dog.  But Razzle gives me the gift of unconditional love and affection like no other cat I have ever owned.

What I'd like to say to you as we say goodbye to 2011 is this:  when God puts simple gifts on your path of life, pick them up and cherish them. Don't close your mind or heart to opportunities to love, share, and follow the path he lays before your feet.  Even if that path seems to be narrow and crooked or makes no sense, He's got the master road map for your life.  Apparently that included an orange-cream colored cat for me; the cat needed help, and fast, and I needed another animal in my life to love.

Razzle has been here only a few weeks yet he has taught me love, and patience, and generosity.  Simple gifts I suppose, but sometimes, things that are simple have surprisingly complex ramifications.

Don't turn your back on love, and don't turn your back on little things in your day.  If I had done what the person on the phone had said - "I would have dumped him at the nearest animal shelter - " my life would have lost one more facet of beauty, a simple gift of unconditional love that frankly, I needed, but had no idea I needed. 

I don't know how this particular path will turn out or where it's going, but Razzle is here to stay.  New paths opened for me in 2011 that I never thought possible, sometimes with amazing alacrity.  I published a new book on model horses and a quarterly hobby journal that is getting good reviews.  I was accepted into the Master Gardener program and begin next week.  I went fishing for the first time and enjoyed it.  I made time for friends and took some time off.  Business opportunities have started flowing in rather than my chasing after them, resulting in more potential opportunities for me in 2012 than in similar quarters in years past.  I feel delighted and grateful that many simple gifts have been given to me.

You too are given simple gifts every day of your life.  Whether it's your own version of Razzle cat seeking affection or a moment that's going to turn your life around, embrace the gifts when God presents them to you.  Every day is a gift. It's a cliche, but all cliches are rooted in truth.

Have a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year!

The Tenacity of Broccoli

Yes, broccoli.

I went out to the compost pile this morning to throw the remains of breakfast - grapefruit rinds, pear cores, and a really awful orange that tasted like dry carpet fibers - into the pile. I discovered that the broccoli plants we'd composted over a month ago had continued to grow.  Mind you, the roots are waving in the air, there's no soil on the roots, and we chopped the main crown of florets off.  Oh, but broccoli doesn't care.  It produced a whole new crop of broccoli crowns along the thick trunk-like stem.  Despite several hard frosts, despite the fact that the compost pile sits under a dense stand of pine trees, despite no soil....I'm not quite sure how the darned thing did it, but it did it. It produced another crop for me.  And I picked it, and it's sitting soaking in cold water until I can eat it for lunch.

Have you ever met anything more generous in the natural world than plants?  Anything more amazing?

Even a broccoli can awe you if you look at it a certain way.

Canned Bees

Now I have seen some pretty strange things in gardening catalogs and seed catalogs, and working in the garden center many years ago I saw some unusual products come through our hands.  But today when I opened up one of the many lovely seed catalogs that came in the mail something stumped me.  It was a can of bees. I mean literally, something that looked like one of those giant Budweiser cans of beer but sealed and called Mason Bees.  I did a double take. Canned bees? You can buy bees by the can, through the mail?

Yes, apparently you can (pun intended.) They're called Mason bees, and each can supposedly holds some female bees who each lay 25 to 30 eggs to make little bees.  The catalog sold bee houses and bee colony equipment too.  You purchase your canned bees, put up your little bee house, and hopefully the little buggers go to work pollinating your trees and such.

Considering I have 30 fruit trees needing bees...I'm starting to get interested in this. But one problem. I'm a little scared of bees.  Not phobic by any means, I just don't like them near me.  If I'm working out in the garden of course I tolerate them. Bees are your friend and mine in the garden, from the tiniest yellow jacket to the giant carpenter bees like my lovesick bee friend.  We all want plenty of bees for good pollination, particularly those of us who grow fruit trees.

As we start looking through the gardening catalogs for nut trees and the fig trees I want to add to the orchard, my eyes keep straying to that can of bees.  A can of bees.  What will they think of next?

And how can I convince hubby that I need canned bees and a cute little bee house in the orchard?

Happy Boxing Day

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! Christmas was lovely this year because the emphasis was on faith, family and friends, in that order - NOT food, gifts and consumerism.  I'm not talking about becoming a Scrooge and doing away with giving presents, but I am talking about putting the emphasis where it belongs - with relationships, first with God and then with your family and friends.

My friend Cecilia called me from Los Angeles around 9:30 p.m to wish me a Merry Christmas and send her love and best wishes to the choir.  We miss her beautiful soprano voice and cheerfulness for sure every week but she's moved on to a new job in the midwest.  She didn't forget her friends back east though, and it was so nice to let everyone know we had a friend on the West Coast rooting for us as we sang the new translation of the Gloria for the first time.

Midnight Mass was wonderful but for me a struggle with my body clock.  I am a morning person and my body does not adjust to staying up late.  I couldn't even stay up late as a teenager. I am still feeling "hung over" from sleep deprivation today and battling a migraine, which is what happens to me when I go off my sleep schedule, but it was worth it to start Christmas was carols, songs and hugs from my church family. 

Then it was home to my family nest - with Christmas morning under the tree snuggling with both cats and Shadow as we unwrapped a few presents from friends who brought hostess gifts to last weekend's Christmas dinner.  My little godson sent Christmas presents for the pets, and Pierre and Raz enjoyed their new catnip toy, a weird green plastic ball with fringe on it, and a new brush for Raz.  Shadow got jerky treats and she loved them so much she sat next to the shelf where we placed them out of her reach and worshipped the bag from afar.  We spent the day watching endless reruns of "A Christmas Story" to the point where we started reciting lines - "You'll shoot your eye out!" - and I worked on my counted cross stitch and ran out of thread.  I worked out too, and walked on the treadmill for half an hour grooving to the oldies on the CD player

So now today is Boxing Day, which doesn't mean we all punch each other in the nose.  Back in the olden days when people had servants it was the day to give servants their boxes or presents.  Since I am the servant here as well as the mistress of the house, I think I will treat myself to some time to myself later.  I am planning the vegetable garden, perusing the seed catalogs, and I'll probably go out and pull up more of the spent marigolds later to get some fresh air. I can't believe how the spring flowering perennials are all blooming - I've got daffodils emerging, Dutch iris already up, and even yarrow - yes, yarrow - blooming away.  Thank God no snow but honestly,  my poor plants are confused and think it is Easter instead of Christmas.

Happy Boxing Day and hope your Christmas was merry!

How King Montezuma's Favorite Plant Became the Christmas Poinsettia

Sometimes the history of plants reads like a soap opera. I researched and wrote two pieces this morning about poinsettia, and the more I dug into the topic, the more fascinated I became with this beautiful plant. I love poinsettia and while I choose silk over the real thing, my window boxes along the front porch are adorned with stems of silk poinsettia and I have two big fake ones outside my front door.  I have tablecloths with red poinsettia and my favorite Christmas candle is a big sparkly glass candle with a painting of a poinsettia on it.  As I look at all these symbols of Christmas, I can't help but smile.  The Europeans may have conquered the Aztecs, but their favorite plant conquered OUR holiday!

King Montezuma, the last of the Aztecs, so loved the poinsettia that he sent caravans into the lower elevations to return with the plants to adorn his palace; it wouldn't grow on the higher elevations where he lived.  For nearly 100 years, one family in California held the secret to growing the perfect poinsettias until lab technicians unlocked their secret - in 1990! Conquerers, angels whispering secrets to poor Mexican girls, clever marketing and more make up the rich history of the poinsettia.

Read more in my article, How the Poinsettia Became Associated with Christmas.

A Christmas Wish for You

Razzle Cat

Shadow, wearing her Christmas finery

I got a nice email from Liz at the Cooperative Extension office thanking me for my recent posts on Christmas cactus.  Liz is my mentor in the Master Gardener program, and she's been a reader of this blog for a while.  As in many things in this brave new world of blogging and social media, we've never met, although we frequently correspond through email and sometimes phone calls. It was nice to hear that my articles on Christmas cacti helped her with her own. It's so disappointing to have a beautiful Christmas cactus one day and a bald one the next with all the blossoms like shriveled up pieces of tissue paper on the ground.

As we get nearer to New Year's Eve, I feel more and more thankful for this year. My life has unfolded in interesting new ways - Razzle the cat found us this fall and added to joy to our family, I was accepted into the Master Gardener program, I published a new book.   Lately it seems that with each passing day I feel more and more grateful for all the little things in the day than the big gifts.  Last night as we walked the dog, a huge flock of robins - hundreds of them - swirled overhead near the cattle fields, diving down and alighting on the bare branches of the trees arched against a lightly clouded sky.  Sunset filtered through the clouds, bathing the area in an unearthly golden light tinged with sunset orange.  The cattle lowed in the field, and a hawk cried in the woods behind us.  We just paused, drinking it all in, grateful for the moment.

Someone emailed me to ask how I did this - "I want joy in my life, not just happiness," she said.  I wanted to tell her about the robins and the sunset, the hawk, moments like now when both cats are snoring on the quilt and Shadow is snoozing at the foot of the bed.  But it's hard to explain these moments of joy.

People often think that joy is one big goal to achieve, like a finish line to cross. It's more like stringing beads on a necklace.  Little beads like seeing the robins, big beads like starting a new course of study in something I love, little beads like having friends over for dinner last weekend, big beads like planning a trip.

...no presents, but we still love the tree.

This Christmas, what I want to give people is joy.  I'm tired of all the commercialism around Christmas. We stopped giving gifts years ago and instead donate the money to a series of charities we support.  We throw open our house and host a Christmas dinner for neighbors and friends.  We plan a few days of time together, quietly, serenely in the midst of the Christmas madness.

Somehow, I don't think Jesus intended for us to get into credit card debt just because it's his birthday. I think he would rather we give him the gift of joy - by giving it to others.

Merry Christmas, dear readers! 

Special Low Price on How to Attract Birds to the Garden

To entice you to try one of my gardening books, the new price for the Kindle and eBook version of my book "How to Attract Birds to the Garden" is just $2.99. That's it! Plus, there's a preview up on the publisher's site now so you can read the first few pages and see if you like it.

If you enjoyed my book Get Your Hands Dirty - A Beginner's Guide to Gardening, you will enjoy this one too!




I cover the basics of attracting wild birds to the garden, including:

• Tree, shrubs, and flowers to plant that birds love
• Types of feeders and bird seed to attract songbirds, woodpeckers and other interesting birds
• Water elements including bird baths and more
• Instructions on how to mix your own bird seed and make a suet feeder from pinecones
• Advice on dealing with squirrels and other pests!

For just $2.99, it's a steal. View the preview or buy the eBook at Lulu.com

Growing Amaryllis

Amaryllis come along just when you think you can't stand winter another moment.  As the days grow shorter, and the nights longer, here comes the gigantic screaming red trumpets of the amaryllis flower as if to say, "Here I am! Sunshine! Warmth! Life! Stand back, winter."

I don't know how amaryllis became associated with the holidays, but you stumble over amaryllis displays in every big box store from coast to coast.  I love the amaryllis bulb kits - they're easy to use, they come with everything you need, and they're inexpensive. It's like just add water and get an instant houseplant.

Having discovered through trial and error that amaryllis love bright warm rooms, I advise anyone interested in growing the brilliant amaryllis to:

• Follow the package directions on the kit, especially when you're planting amaryllis.  The bulbs should be planted just to the soil line, meaning that the soil should cover the bulb and go just to the where the bulb's neck meets the rounded bulb portion. Look at the little picture that comes with your amaryllis kit to make sure you're doing it right.
• Don't water the amaryllis bulb too much at the beginning.  You can and should water it more after the green stem and at least one set of leaves appear.
• Once the leaves appear, the amaryllis will remind you of an alien plant. It grow fast - super fast - and you'll swear you blink and it's gained a few inches in height.  
• When the flowers appear, the stalk may not be strong enough to support them.  Since it's tough to find a plant stake at the garden center in the middle of the winter, I've used a dowel from Lowe's, spray painted green to hide it among the stalks, as a plant support, and a green twist-tie from the bread to tie the amaryllis to its support.

One thing I learned today while researching an article for a client is that you can get an amaryllis to bloom again if you cut back the flower stalk after it's finished its first blooming period.  I will need to try that with my next amaryllis.

For more on Growing Amaryllis, please enjoy my latest article for Main Line Gardening.

And Then There Were Three

His royal highness, Pierre

Had a request from a Pierre fan for an animal update.  So I'm calling this one, "And then there were three."


We have been really careful to keep Raz and Pierre apart for the most part, with supervised visits. So far it has worked just fine.  The staff at the veterinary hospital advised us to make sure we keep the boy's water, food bowls and litter boxes separate due to the virus Raz carries, even though Pierre is vaccinated against the virus.  So Raz has his accoutrements in one room of the house, Pierre's in another.  Raz sleeps in that room at night too, so we don't worry about the boys getting into a spat while we're trying to rest.

We've been gradually letting Raz out for longer and longer periods of time, and on Sunday, he stayed out of his room the entire morning.  Raz kept chasing Pierre on previous days, but finally the two cats settled into the living room. As long as Pierre is up high - perched on the back of a chair, or on the back of the couch, or even sitting on the coffee table while Raz is on the floor - he's fine with it.  Raz is an awful jumper.  He can't even jump up onto the bed. He seems content to box up on the floor the way cats do, folding his front paws in to make a neat little box of himself.  He sits there and trills a little song to Pierre, while Pierre glares at him down his regal nose.  Then the two just doze off and that's that.  No fights, no fuss, no muss.

Raz discovered the couch...

Raz is an odd little cat.  He doesn't seem to know how to play.  I have a bunch of toys in his room - a stuffed opossum we call Opie for some strange reason, a stuffed chicken with feathers, a toy mouse, a ball.  He doesn't play when he's alone.  He liked to watch out his windows, and he seems to like to sleep on things I've knitted, which does wonders for my ego. I have a cat bed that I knitted for my old black cat. She hated it.  I then tried to entice Pierre into it when he was a kitten. We have one photo of him as a fluffy gray kitten, blue eyes matching the blue of the cat bed, staring up at us.  But the next night he refused to sleep in the cat bed.

Raz loves it. I made him a bed in the garage on his first night with us using a cardboard box, the knitted cat bed, and a flannel blanket I'd gotten from the Humane Society as a thank you for a donation made long ago.  I made him a nest, and moved the box upstairs to his bedroom. He prefers that box to the fluffy cat bed I bought him at the store.  Pierre already snagged the cat bed, but it doesn't matter. Raz prefers his cardboard box and homemade hand-me-downs.

He has a good appetite, he drinks and does all the natural things a cat is supposed to do, but he doesn't seem to know how to play.  When he's with me in the office, he does bat around a green toy mouse.  But only when he has some company.

He purrs, he enjoys being petted, and he loves Shadow. Shadow is like his big furry mama.  She licks him and when he meows inside his room in the morning to let us know he's ready to come out for the day and sun himself on the couch, she lays down outside of his room and watches with worried eyes until she can sniff him and reassure herself he is okay.

And then there were three...

Shadow is really an amazing dog. She already knows the names of the cats - and she herds them.  Shepherds them, I guess, since she is a German shepherd.  If Pierre is doing something bad, like trying to jump up on to of the television set, I yell, "Shadow. Get Pierre!" And she's off and running, herding him out of the living room and into the dining room away from trouble. If Raz starts sharpening his claws on the couch, we just have to yell, "Raz, NO!" and Shadow bounds into the room.  She's gentler with Raz, but she herds him away from the object being destroyed, pushing him with her nose and biting him gently on the back when he disobeys.

Raz returns to the vet hospital this week and I hope he is showing more improvement. In the meantime, I have to rummage through the box of old Christmas stockings in the basement and find one to remake over for the new guy.  Santa has to leave him toys, too!

Surprises from the Organic Vegetable Garden

I love the fall vegetable garden, not just for the abundance, but for the surprises.  Just when you think you've harvested everything, along comes a surprise potato...a carrot neglected among the weeds...or the cauliflower, which we thought was nothing but leaves, but which hides fist-sized heads of creamy-colored florets.

Some of the vegetables we left outside on purpose. The parsnips, turnips and carrots were so generous this year that we had absolutely no room for them in the refrigerator.  My freezer is packed with pint-sized containers of blanched and frozen carrots.  Turnips store fairly well, but we've already put up bags of them in the garage, which is now doubling as a cold-storage room until the spring thaw. So we left them in the ground, figuring that the soil would insulate them for a few weeks longer, and the cool to cold weather would slow their growth rate so that they wouldn't get much bigger.

The red cabbage is slowly forming into heads, and the cauliflower finally allowed us to peek inside the leathery green leaves to find the edible head. The broccoli continues to surprise us; the last stalks left in the garden not only produced another lovely head of broccoli, but it was so tender, so sweet, that even the broccoli haters in the household looked hopeful when I brought the bowl to the table.

Now is also the time for planning. The Parks catalog arrived, and I have already dog-eared several pages, including a page of asparagus for the new asparagus bed we are planting next year, and the sweet potatoes, which will once again have pride of place in the garden.  I sat down at the computer over the weekend and mapped out the vegetable beds, printing a blank form so that I can pencil in each variety.

Next year, my goal is not only to share with you the pictures, the progress, but also what I planted, when I planted it, and the yield.

In the meantime, as we start thinking about putting up the Christmas tree and writing out the Christmas cards, the Parks catalog beckons. I wonder if Santa can fit a few seed packets onto his sleigh?

See How They Grow - Measuring the Orchard Trees

Each year around Thanksgiving we measure the trees in the orchard.  When we planted them in late fall 2007 - spring 2008, they were just pitiful sticks with a twist of root (if we were lucky!).  They ranged in size from 18" to 2'.

Now three years later, our trees have soared.  The tallest tree is Bartlett pear tree that is now over 11 feet tall. We have four pear trees in all - two Bartletts and two Orients.  Among the four, three are over 10 feet tall, but one Orient pear remains about 6 feet tall.

The peach trees had quite a growth spurt this year, each one gaining at least two feet or more.  Some of the apple trees gained a foot or more in height, but not all.

We keep examining the measurements, the location, and the variety of tree to see a pattern, but none emerges.  At first we thought that perhaps the trees in the second row received more sun and thus grew taller, but no - in some cases, the trees closer to the woods, which  receive slightly less sunlight than the other trees, grew the fastest.

Water may be a factor, or it may not be.  All of the trees receive rain water and obviously, it's about equal, although the orchard is planted on a slight slope. The apple trees are at the top of the slope, then the peach trees, the pears, the plums, cherries and apricot trees.  We supplement rainwater with hand-watering during the hottest periods of the summer and in times of drought.  Considering the discrepancies among the growth rate of the trees, I'd say it is not really a question of growing conditions, but more a factor of the differences in individual trees themselves.  Two trees of the same variety planted side by side, receiving nearly identical soil, fertilizer, sunlight and water can be very different.

Nature never fails to surprise me. The differences among the trees remind me that even plants are individuals, each with unique qualities.  Sometimes when I look out across the orchards, the woods or the garden, I see the plants as one big mass of the same; there's my spread of day lilies, the iris, the peonies, the roses, the coneflower, the herbs, the apple trees. Yet when we measure them and inspect each one individually, we note many differences. The trees take on personalities of their own.  They are as unique as we are.

The True Miracle

For a writer, I get strangely tongue-tied (or maybe finger-tied in this age of typing everything on a keyboard) when it comes to describing deep mysteries. One such mystery is how a young man I've never met named Matthew has, inadvertently, deepened my prayer life, made me more sensitive to the suffering of others, and made me consider the awesome power - for good, not for ill - of social media.

It happened like this.

A friend of mine from college named Regina and I reconnected through social media.  Regina teaches English and religion. She is funny, witty, and super bright, and I consider her the authority on all things orthodox Catholic. I enjoy following her updates on Facebook.  I laugh out loud at her children's antics, her battles with her Weight Watchers leader, her wrestling matches with her mini van with close to 200,000 miles on it.

Then, sometime in September, she invited me into a group called Prayers for Matt.

I've never met Matt. I've never met his parents, Sue or Mike. I don't know his family.  I live in southern Virginia, they live in northern Virginia near my friend.  Yet suddenly, I'm being asked to pray for a young man admitted to the hospital with ARDS - Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.  You can read about it here.


That was in the fall.  I began praying for Matt, a college student I've never met. Because of Regina, I started following his progress updates on Facebook.  I invited friends from my church to pray for him.  Suddenly, we were over 1,000 people, worldwide, praying for this young man.  Young and adult, lay people and nuns and priests and all sorts of folks praying for a miracle for this young man struggling for his life.

We read with growing horror as he was moved from Virginia to Maryland for more care, for better experts on his condition.  And I read with a dawning sense of dread last night his mother's last post - that he was declining, quickly.

This morning, Regina posted that he had passed away last night. Despite hundreds of people, countless prayers, countless petitions, he'd died of heart failure last night at age 26.

I was left staring at my computer screen. This isn't supposed to happen.

College students aren't supposed to contract pneumonia, go into ARDS, and die in the ICU.   It doesn't happen today, right? But it did.

Someone said to me rather cynically, "So much for prayer." Yet I wonder....

Over the past several months, I have committed to prayer for this young man as I have not done in a long time.  I have said a rosary every morning for him; I've prayed during the Eucharist for him. I've thought of him throughout the day, a brief glancing thought that made me remember to say prayers during my day. Whenever I saw a crucifix, I thought of Matt; I thought of his mother when I saw a picture of Mary.  She too saw a child die.

When I heard he'd died, I found myself gently singing the new Gloria from the Mass of Creation, the refrain over and over again, "Glory to God in the highest; and peace to all peoples on earth."  Wishing peace for Matt, peace for his mother and father and his sisters and brothers. What a Christmas. My heart aches for them all. 

Only God knows when each of us will die, and when, and why.  Why God decided to make an otherwise healthy 26 year old die like this is not something I'm ever going to know.  But I can see how in a strange way he used it in my life to work a miracle, to help me better understand prayer. I got out of my own head and tried to help, albeit in a small way, a family I've never met and may never meet every in my life, because a friend asked me too. It was a simple as that. And my own eyes teared up when I saw his death notices this morning.

How many other people were changed as a result of this?


It would have been great if we'd been granted a miracle and Matt had suddenly risen from his bed, thrown off the life support equipment, and breathed freely.  But that wasn't the miracle we were given.

We were given the miracle we needed, not the one we wanted.

The miracle of 1,700+ total strangers come together and offer love freely for a young man some have never met. Of seeing the prayers, the love, the outpouring of spiritual and physical support for his parents?

Is that not a miracle in and of itself?