I MISS YOU ALREADY

While making plans for a more comfortable winter I realize that I will greatly miss Cedar. We have become good friends and she is an excellent companion. As Mike has penned in "Honoring Elders" I am closer to her generation than to my children's. There is a delightful quality about our time together that will be difficult to abandon for the four months I am away from here. So I miss her already and I'm not even gone. I recall a time while telling tales at a teepee camp near the site of the battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana that an elder man turned his face away and would not look toward me anymore. Afterwards he sought me out to apologize for what he thought appeared quite rude on his part. He said, "My wife perished in a small airplane that crashed some years ago. Your story brought the image of her looking from the window just minutes before the accident." He'd turned away to hide his tears. But there was no plane in my story so I was puzzled. He added, "When you said the woman and the bear were lonely for each other even before they said 'goodbye', I was reminded of that day." We met several times while I was there. We never spoke again but he always greeted me with a dear small smile and an aching sadness in his lonely eyes.