If Tess had known she would think of him as often as she did during her final days she may have made different choices many decades ago.  If she knew he would appear in her dreams, nightly, standing in the sunlight on a pathless mountainside under a blue sky while she struggled, step by step, over rocks and snow to reach him…she may have never said hello.  And yet so many years ago, she initiated a simple conversation without fully releasing she also made a choice to make a space for this strange man in her mind and heart.

Tess entered his life and he her’s, grateful for a providential connection.  She loved this man as she did her husband without ever really, fully knowing him.

[Boundaries remained intact.  Years later when middle age became old age, gray hair to white hair, wrinkles abundant, widowed, and often alone, but seldom unhappy…