One wonderful thing and one fun thing a day!
Today's wonderful thing is that I know God has my family in his care. Last night we took flowers to the daughter of our new friend Elisa Bianco, who has gone back to Brazil . Elisa has a deep concern for her daughter and grandchildren, who a few months ago lost their husband/father to cancer. As we dropped those flowers off, we told the daughter that we know what it's like to be far away from family, and that because we know our children and their families are being cared for, we wanted her to know the same thing, in Elisa's behalf. Right now it is hard for her to see past her grief - I cannot even imagine! - but we were glad to do this little thing.
The fun thing is that we saw a beautiful, in-progress, still wild-looking garden in the back of some members' apartment today. The only thing that had been there when they moved in two months ago was a gnarled pomegranate tree, with three bursting fruits still clinging to it. The young man we'd come to visit, Michelangelo, told us that there were ants inside the tree and inside the fruit, but when he went to pick one to show us, it was ant-free. He picked and offered pieces of it to us as a piccola merendina - a little afternoon tea snack. We stood in the garden among partially laid tiles, tomato plants that had grown from when someone on an upper floor tossed tomato remnants out the window, various potted plants and imaginative pottery sculptures, eating our pomegranate seeds and coming to know Michelangelo just a little bit. It felt like a kind of a secret place. We are privileged to have been allowed to share it.
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