Blue Eyes {Smiling} In The Rain

Zack Brown is playing in a dirty white truck that's speeding somewhere down the highway around a town that Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam immortalized forever in song.

350 miles away, here on this ranch nestled in mountains and valleys, I'm playing the same song and don't even know that she's listening to it too.

2 blonde heads.

She's a little bit Mae West and I'm a little bit Marilyn Monroe...

Two sets of blue eyes. Mine are grey-blue, like a sky that's ready to storm, hinting at my temper, maybe? Her's are bright blue, as if some hidden source of light is continuously shining through them, never betraying the fact that she has faced a pain far too great for her years.

When she's away I do chores, scrape hides, work horses, do homework and am thankful that I'm not on the road this time. When she returns, she tumbles, falls, and bounces into my arms...all at the same time. I swat her with my gloves, she bites my arm hard. Nothing's changed since she was little. In fact, as we're walking through the wrangle pen from her house she reaches out and clutches my shirt the way she used to when she was shorter than she is now. "Wait up Lilibet, my legs aren't as long as yours!"

Heedless of her town clothes she jumps in and cheerfully helps me unload and stack a trailer full of wood. We fall into an easy rhythm and our conversation jumps from topic to topic like we haven't seen each other in weeks, instead of the day and a half that it's actually been.

It's Sunday, and two matching, crooked smiles are reunited...the song that my heart can't sing, home again with me.



xo xo Liz