Silly Old Bear

This week I expanded my blog universe with the discovery of a couple of fellow bloggers whose writing style I absolutely love. One of them is Kyla Roma (pictured at right). In her own words, Kyla is “a twenty four year old girl living in the Canadian Prairies under the biggest sky I’ve ever seen. I’m a black tea aficionado, crafty lady, vegetarian, thrift shopping addict, puppy mama and wife. I’m a homebody, a voracious reader and am deeply silly.”

I came across Kyla’s blog on January 5, and was impressed with the one resolution she made for the year 2010.

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About four months after Ashley died, Susan and Justin and I took a trip from our home in Texas to visit some friends in Tennessee and then spend a few days in the Great Smoky Mountains. Driving late at night, somewhere between Memphis and Nashville, the idea for a song began growing in my head. It was a tribute to the remarkable life of my Ashley, her profound impact on our lives as her family, and the deep emptiness left in our hearts by her death. But even amidst the palpable sadness of our grief, I found my thoughts, and the emerging song, focusing on the hope that is inherent in my faith — the promise that, one day, we will see her and hold her once again.

The more we drove, the more the song grew and began to organize itself into verses and a chorus. I asked Susan to find some paper and a pen and start writing down the words so that I wouldn’t forget them. I drove and Susan wrote, and by the time we reached Nashville, “Until Then” was a song.

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