Hope

Never give up hope. It's a word that's easy to say but hard to live when your life has crashed around you. But the rescue of three kidnapped women from a Cleveland, Ohio home late yesterday has brought hope back to three families who had been clinging to gossamer threads for more than ten years. A set of situations coalesced to allow Amanda Berry and two other women along with a six-year-old child to be rescued from a run down house in Cleveland. They had been kidnapped and held for ten years or more by three brothers. Their rescue was nothing short of miraculous - a neighbor hearing a woman calling out for help forced the front door open, allowing the women to leave and phone 911. A neighborhood and a city are celebrating today.

Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus were two of the women rescued yesterday.

My latest novel centers around never losing hope. Although I'm only a few chapters into it, that seems to be the thread that will hold it all together. As always, when I start writing something outside of the Tolkien universe I needed to break away from the writing to do some research. Fortunately, research can be fun, especially in this age of the internet, Google and You Tube, so all is good. I'm dreaming of the story so I feel comfortable with how it is progressing. I also have two short stories in the Tolkien universe in the works and they are turning into a lot of fun, so I'm back into a writing groove again.

So many things to do, so many things to look at.
Bead & Button Show is the largest bead show in the
nation. I've attended every year since the mid-1990's.

Good experiences can create hope and for me, my annual experience is the Bead & Button Show. I always look at this week of classes, social engagements and friends with hope that it will be an amazing week and that everyone I meet will be happy to have shared this time with me. I received my badges and tickets in the mail yesterday. Nothing ever seems real until I'm holding these in my hand. But in less than a month, I'll be in Milwaukee enjoying the experience of being surrounded by creative people, learning new ways to play with metal and fire, and trying to not spend money that I don't have. I'll be paying this vacation off until late this year but it's worth it. I finally got the classes paid off in March, then I paid for my trip to Chicago when I paid down my credit card bill yesterday, and now I'll have a hotel bill to pay off until the end of the summer. Attending the show usually gives me nine months of paying my credit card down, but seeing good friends and the high of being with people who are creative and artistic - well, as the commercial says, "Priceless".

Hope is a small flame, but it must never be extinguished.

Hope is such a human emotion. It buoys us up in rough waters, gives us strength to forge on when everything looks dire, and pushes us to do our absolute best. It is hope that keeps someone diagnosed with a serious  disease to keep fighting, it is hope that keeps a parent in difficult circumstances focus on raising a child to do have a better life, and it is hope that allows me to think that someday, in an unforeseeable future, there will be peace on this planet. I refuse to give up my hope.