Just when the caterpillar thought life was over, she became a butterfly

At the edge of the sea, at the edge of the Great Lakes, where you can't see anything but water far into the horizon, you stand as close as a mortal can to oblivion. If you never turn around, and just keep staring out into that vast void of endless waves, you begin to realize in some small part just how small we all are.

Death seeps into the edges of life like black ink on the blotting cloth. A photo of youth, someone you can't hardly recognize in their form of today. Just a memory, that youthful face forever engraved in sepia on paper.

The flies and sinkers hang on their rod above my grandfather's work desk, right where he left them the last time he poured the hot lead into the mold and turned off the tungsten brown of the light off for the very last time. Life is but a breath, a vapor in the wind.

The last of the summer's flowers shouts in her yellow dress: this can't be the end! There must be somewhere cancer can't devour, and hearts can't flutter to a stop and tears leak for days on end like a dripping faucet that refuses to be completely shut off.

I hold a dying man's hand for the first time in many years, and I am grateful to be back. Being a nurse is such a large chunk of who I am created to be. I revel in the reading, catching up on ventriculostomies and arterial blood gases while the unit whirs constant around me. I come home refreshed, with a brighter joy when I see the faces of my children.

It feels like something returning, something that was snuffed out for many years. I think it might be me.

you do your work the best that you can 

you put one foot in front of the other 

life comes in waves and makes it's demands 

you hold on as well as you’re able 

you've been here for a long long time 

hope has a way of turning its face to you 

just when you least expect it 

you walk in a room you look out a window 

and something there leaves you breathless

you say to yourself it's been a while since i felt this 

but it feels like it might be hope 

it's hard to recall what blew out the flame 

it's been dark here since you can remember 

you talk it all through to find it a name 

as days go on by without number

~It Might Be Hope, Sara Groves~