I have to admit that I have been struggling a little lot to come up with ideas for my blog posts over the past few days, so if you find yourself getting a bit bored, just give up and pass on to the next name on your blog roll! I will quite understand, and promise that I won't be offended!!
Some of the writing that I have been reading lately has been inspired, and I am particularly enjoying the posts of much younger blogging friends. I am amazed at the depth of their thinking, the warmth of their writing and their appreciation of the beauty of life around them. To me, that gives us all hope for the future. In the media you tend to just hear about all the badness that is out there but, believe me, there are a lot of young people out there who we should be really proud of.
Coming back to the title of my post, today I am grateful for the gift of "friendship." I am an only child and I am very blessed with my two daughters, and I love being with them. Several of my friends come from quite large families of five or six, so they have brothers and sisters who they go and visit and chat with on the phone and, the older I get, the more I think that I would have loved to have had a sister. Someone who has been there all your life, with the same shared memories of growing up with mum and dad.
My friends think that I have a very 'romantic' view of families and that it is not all sweetness and light between siblings! Perhaps I watched too many episodes of The Waltons when I was growing up. I used to love the ending of each show, when they said something like "Goodnight ma, goodnight pa, goodnight Mary Ellen, goodnight John Boy!" (although there were more names called out than that, because there were seven children altogether).
So, my girlfriends (isn't it funny, how we still call them girlfriends, even though one of them is 77!) are very important to me. We share holidays together, we go to the cinema and theatre, we visit stately homes and gardens, we go on coastal walks and out for meals, so we have lots of happy memories. More importantly, they are there with me sharing the good times and, also, the sad times. They're always there with an encouraging word if needed. In short, they are just 'there' for me, as I am always there for them.
How sad a world it would be if we didn't have friendship in it.
"A Life Without Friendship Is Like a Garden Without Flowers."
