If you know me, you know I grew up in a small town.

What a blessing it was.

I saw so many people this weekend who I haven’t seen in years–30, 40 years in some cases.

I’ve been trying for a couple days to put words around something … trying to articulate how people can be so altered and at the same time even more themselves.

Then this morning it came to me: “tempered.” We’ve been tempered.

The things that have happened to us that burned so hot–

By which I mean not only the painful (losing the loved one, the marriage that went bad, that tore up, tore us up) but anything extraordinary. The day you look at your kid and it strikes you, this person here, this extraordinary person who is part of you but not, the center of your life but free to go  and then one day gone but never really gone. That heat, also.

The decisions we make. (I’m moving away. I’m moving back. I’ll take this job. I’ll quit. I’m going to fight this thing. I’m done fighting …)

Tempered by the heat of the extraordinary, and the extraordinary is anything that heats the heart.

It burns off what doesn’t matter and leaves what does. And you can see what’s left in peoples’ faces, in how they stand. It doesn’t even take words.

I love you all so much.

I’m so blessed, to have grown up in a small town.

I love you all so very, very much.