Spring has arrived .. I have new baby chicks to attend to and in doing so I am watching similarities unfold between them and Caleb. They are so feeble, but so determined. They are grateful for the food and water I provide. They are full of life even if they do not yet see outside the limitations of their pen. Caleb is moving forward. He has always managed to be the most courageous person I ever met and I know he will not settle for the conditions he now lives with. He will find his way.


We are all reaching way down deep to find our strength. Kai works his mind to categorize and make sense. He is very capable of verbalizing his hardship and putting a name to it. Max uses his silence, his stillness. I simply put one foot in front of the other. I garden, I weed, I rake. I raise chicks.

When long ago, my friend Ellen and I cleaned houses to supplement our income, we would walk into a mess of a house and immediately put the fresh flowers out before picking up any cleaning agents. We did this with fanfare .. arranging it just right. It was, in a way, like putting the horse before the cart, but in doing so we could actualize, in our minds .... just what the end result would look like.

I feel the boys and I doing this now. We speak of happier times in the future. We are creating substantial plans for the fall. We hold in our minds the vision of Caleb as whole and complete. We plan to create something that Jan would feel a part of ... something that will remind us that he has not left us at all.

If you want to do something to help us --- as many of you have demonstrated already. Don't add to the Caleb Potter fund ... go buy yourself the biggest bouquet of flowers that you can afford today and arrange them as if nothing were more important .
Arrange your lives with beauty .. for beauty abounds.

mumsie.