There was a crooked man
Who walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence
Against a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a crooked little house.

I once knew a woman you could compare with a warm towel straight from the dryer on a cold day. A warm towel makes all the cold disappear. You don't want to go to work because the towel is such a safe and comfortable object of simplicity. She was a mother of four and in my early married days I considered every aspect of her life to be absolute. If there was tear she'd turn it to laughter. A question of faith and she'd find the answer. I wouldn't call her perfect. Though I wanted very much to be like her. I modeled my marriage after hers. I found myself yearning for children just so I could be even a shaving of the mother she was. I always thought that a mother was a child's connection to the future. A mother, by nurture, not nature, teaches a child all the fundamentals of how to become an able functioning adult. Around my second year of marriage things began to change. Just little things at first. We would often go over to her house on Sundays for dinner after church. And by dinner I mean a hot home cooked meal with homemade iced tea and dessert. That was the first act of love to go. There were no more Sunday dinners. I saw less and less of her as the months went by. I was busy with my own life trying hard to discover the wife and mother in me that I didn't notice when we didn't talk at all.
TO BE CONTINUED...