One photo, many blessings

So many blessings in this picture

• The man leaning against the lamppost is my husband.  He would soon be leaving me for four months in Coast Guard Officer Training School.  We swore we'd never spend another night apart after those four months.  His draft number was 29, but he escaped the draft by joining the Coast Guard.
• The coat he's wearing was his daddy's Navy pea coat, worn in World War II.  One day, years later, I left it in my unlocked car and someone stole it.  My husband wrote about it in his weekly newspaper column and a kind woman knocked on our door with her own husband's pea coat in her hands.
• The house in  the background is the much loved family lake house when it was only a few years old.
• The larger dog is Sam, who adopted us one summer.   He appeared one day and was so hungry that he tried  to eat the hose.  He loved us all but he and my dad had a special bond.
• The smaller dog is Zippy. She came to us when we were children and she was a puppy.  When Sam came to live with us Zippy was an old lady of a dog,  but Sam gave her a new outlook on life.  
• The car in the carport, a Carolina blue Toyota Corolla, was our first new car.  We kept it until our oldest child was old enough to drive it.

Gratitude is the memory of the heart.  ~Jean Baptiste Massieu, translated from French