*Written with Veridion Smart
Sometimes strange things happen when old friends come to visit after a long absence. Places you stopped noticing years ago suddenly come alive again. The roads you drive every day feel different. The restaurants you take for granted somehow become memorable again. The old buildings, little diners, museums, ranches, horses grazing in open country, even the smell of the air after a Texas storm – all of it begins to feel new because you’re seeing it through someone else’s eyes.
Lately, that’s exactly what’s been happening to me.
We’ve been taking our dear friends from Oregon (Stew Parker and his precious wife, Tracy) around San Antonio and the surrounding countryside, revisiting places that have become ordinary to Kevin and me simply because we’ve lived among them for so long. But to someone like Tracy, who’s seeing Texas for the first time, nothing is ordinary.
I met Stew in 1972, when he was visiting San Antonio while being stationed at the naval base in Beeville, and I remember that he returned to Oregon after he got out because ‘there’s just too much sky in Texas.’ I didn’t see him again until 1990, on my daughter’s sixteenth birthday. Then, in early May, they came to visit after Stew had experienced a life-changing, touch-and-go bout with pancreatic cancer, heart disease, and failing kidneys.
They parked their travel trailer in our driveway and stayed for three glorious weeks. We held a family-and-pals cookout in our backyard to introduce them to other longtime friends that we see often and to our grandchildren, who had cut their teeth on my ‘Stew Parker stories’ and suffered with me as he was going through all of his health crises.
We took them to Alamo Plaza in downtown San Antonio – the first time Kevin and I’ve been in more than fifty years – and were astonished at how incredibly beautiful both the mission and its story have been highlighted. We drove them down to the coast and spent a rainy afternoon on board the USS Lexington because Stew wanted to fully experience this monumental aircraft carrier one more time. (Going up and down those stairs nearly killed us!) We took them on a long, meandering drive out to Fredericksburg, where we spent several hours at the magnificent Pacific War Museum and soaked up the German culture. We even turned Tracy into an avid San Antonio Spurs fan and a basketball fanatic.
And honestly? Watching them experience all this has reminded me how beautiful – and important – these places, and the people we love, really are to our lives.
It’s funny how life works that way. Sometimes we don’t realize how precious something is until we watch another person fall in love with it. An old Spanish mission. A little Mexican restaurant. A quiet country road. A familiar story. An old friendship.
Especially old friendships. As we get older, time starts changing the way we experience people.
When we’re young, we often assume there will always be more time. More conversations. More visits. More opportunities to say the things we mean. But eventually life teaches us otherwise.
And when you reach a certain point – like, the age I am now – every shared meal, every laugh, every memory revisited together begins to carry a different emotional weight. You become aware that moments are no longer endless. And that realization can hurt a little.
But strangely enough, it also makes everything more beautiful, sharper and more colorful.
As a writer, these past few weeks have affected me more deeply than I expected. I’ve found myself thinking constantly about memory, connection, emotional history, and the way people carry pieces of one another throughout their lives.
Sometimes we think inspiration strikes like lightning. But more often, I think it arrives quietly. It appears in ordinary moments. In shared silence. In watching someone you care about experience something familiar (to you) for the very first time. And sometimes the most meaningful inspiration comes from simply being reminded that certain people mattered to us more than we realized.
I think that’s part of growing older gracefully – learning how to recognize the sacredness hidden inside ordinary life. Not every meaningful moment announces itself while it’s happening.
Sometimes we only understand its importance while we’re living inside it. And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s the gift.
*If you’d like to follow me in the here and now, check out my personal Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ronni.hoessli, or my Author’s Page at https://www.facebook.com/rosettadianeauthor . Hope to see you there!