After watching Hallmark Presents Mitch Albou’s “ Have a Little Faith “ on Sunday, and now the PBS Documentary about Hospice, I feel inclined to set up yet another story dealing with my own pride and prejudices.   The reminder that the generations immediately following me will have more Seniors alive than at any time in our nation’s history…a fact which slid past my ear on more than occasion like a speeding bullet I was grateful that I avoided. Tonight, as I find renewed strength in the thirteenth month after I thought my story would naturally end, I find myself pausing…a rare thing for me….and finding a smile resting within this ‘new’ me. I’ve never been at peace, I always had ‘a five year plan’, a ‘ten year plan’, ‘some-day-I-will’ Plan…It seemed incumbent on me not to be a burden, given my upbringing and the nature of the people who surrounded me in my formative years….Now I shuffle and I praise GOD because I have strength in my slowness that was desperately beyond me at this time mere months ago!

            I stand in a doorway, knowing that what happens next depends on my attitude more than my circumstances. I look through the door hut there is no clear cut path for me to take. Everything may change unexpectedly when I wake in the morning, I can no longer take time for granted, yet it adds a sweetness to the time spent as I lie down each night. Shiloh is hard wired to be a kitty cat, a little tomcat, and yet he has been such a wonderful companion to me- for the most part! And having something respond to me without pulling away is such a godsend. No person ever did. And I certainly don’t understand why GOD has been so patient with me as He has, I’m simply grateful for His mercy and joy. ..as Shiloh bites my finger painfully! Grr…. Love, kitty cat style!

            The one thing from my Daddy and my Grandparents that’s sticking with me right now, is that ‘there’s a reason for everything”…I’d like this book to be about the tender times of saying goodbye. The book I’m completing now is full of action, faith, danger, betrayal and hope….but this little book will lack what is ‘needed’ for a commercial book. I think I’ve written enough of them now to ‘show” I am a writer, the only thing in my life I ever really wanted to be, heart and soul. And it’s going to be this year’s Christmas present to myself, instead of another Paul Lee McWhorter book.

            I miss Big Ed so much, and yet he is closer now than ever before as we are ‘the same age’ at last….I have a little more transcribing to do for “Majesty” on the new website, and I have to finish Sharayah’s Book….but as the year comes to a close and I have over sixty works completed, if I count the 1500 WORD stories and the books or poetry with equal weight with the two, two-volume Novels on Jesus….I think I owe myself a gentle story that simply shines a light on love and family. Don’t thee?

  Asia Rachael Cohen

  Spokane, Washington

  America