Bob & Ron - What Really Matters

Pixabay What Do I Do? My wife and I heard that diagnosis six years ago. It was the worst news of her life. And mine. So, here's what I know: your immediate future will illuminate for you, and her, what kind of husband you are. I’m not a doctor or therapist of any kind. But I’ve trod this path and maybe I can provide you some helpful insight. Here goes... One day in 2013, my wife was her usual, lovely self. The next day she was in the ICU, being asked every hour if she knew what year it was. A week later we were home. There was lots of hope for rehab and how “this diagnosis affects everyone differently.”  The fact is, your future will be what it’ll be. You won’t know how it’ll turn out until it’s all over. For now, the only thing you’ll have is your conviction that you’re going to help her deal with it, no matter what .  Mauricio Graiko @ Shutterstock “I Do?” You don’t have that conviction? Then these next words are especially for you.  Pardon my bluntness here.

travelarium at shutterstock White Snow I met Dwight on a Sunday. He, his family and their dogs were at our sled dog races, on a beautiful day in Colorado’s high country under a cobalt-blue sky. Pure white snow, pure white Samoyeds, there’s nothing better. Colorado mushers usually set up a racecourse somewhere, and they'd get insurance and arrange a safe place for their campers full of dogs and sleds.  They’d flag the course, time the races and, late on Sunday, tear it all down and return to their homes and kennels. If you were a kid and your mom and dad had a dozen Siberians, imagine how much you’d look forward to your first race. Just you on your sled, out there in a snowy forest. With a few fast dogs who could run like the wind. CC0 @ pxfuel Our Town In 1995, the little town where my wife and I lived held an annual sled dog race of our own to attract winter business. We did everything. The mushers only had to show up. Of course, they loved that and brou

Shutterstock Marble 75 years ago, five Marines and a sailor hoisted a flagpole atop Mt. Suribachi. Several of them would die within weeks, there on Iwo Jima. Three of them now rest in Arlington under marble headstones. Near the Continental Divide in Colorado, a tiny town sits at the base of a marble mountain. A century ago, from its quarries men cut great blocks of purest whiteness for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Lincoln Memorial.  David Gould @ Pexels Steam locomotives pulled flatcars piled high with impure pieces of it alongside the  Crystal River, as men shoved them into the river to stabilize its banks.  The town built a schoolhouse atop blocks of it. Dad made the back step of our house out of it.   Of course, t he town's name is Marble. The Poet Wikimedia Commons In 1994, my wife Michelle and I returned to Colorado to live in Redstone, a tiny town downriver from Marble. Michelle was a teacher at the Marble school and, one day at the local i