"I like your wrap," I said to a friend taking her seat near me at our women's Bible study Wednesday night. She was wearing a long, blue-and-white knitted poncho on this getting-cold night.
"Thank you!" the diminutive lady with the curly white hair responded, "It's only the third time I've worn it, and I got it while I was in college!" Thinking I might not have heard her right, after the meeting I said that college was a long time ago!
"No!" she said, "We went to college at 30 and 40 years old, after we had kids!" Well, still a long time ago, I thought, since she was in her late 70's at least! But you would never know it, judging from her active lifestyle! This energetic dynamo seems to be everywhere, whether reading to day care children, manning the phone in the church office, helping in a nursing home, or serving in the kitchen, to name a few, but always ready with a hug and greeting to one and all at church!
I already knew that my friend had taught school in Alaska for 20 years, and that most of her 5 children still live there. She had regaled my husband and me with stories of living in days of darkness and the challenges of the long, arctic winters. "You just get used to it," she shrugs nonchalantly.
What an interesting life! I have always wanted to go to Alaska, and we've had other friends who have lived there. The world is such a varied and marvelous creation! Acts 17:26 tells us, "And have made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation."
Perhaps God has decided where we would live! Our sprightly widowed friend, whose given name is Kitty, says the children she reads to call her "Miss Kitty," "As in Matt Dillon's 'Gun Smoke,'" she says. Well, I don't know if she carried a gun in Alaska in case of bears, but in my book, Kitty is the Cat's Meow!
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