What once was is no more. What happened to who I was? I've changed so much that sometimes I don't recognize myself, yet lingering still is the young boy I once was.

We will walk in bitter rain.
But in dreams
I can hear your name
And in dreams
We will meet again

In The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King at the very end of the movie, Frodo leaves the shire. Frodo leaves the shire, his friends and his home...forever. He says goodbye to his dearest friends. Friends who had changed his life in so many different ways.

He...well...he needs to move on, as do his friends. He will always treasure them and their friendship, but there comes a time when one must move on.

(As a preface to the following randomness... I'm writing from Franciscan University, where I am beginning my college education. I wrote the following piece just after my family left for home.)

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.” (Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay)

I’m sitting outside in our driveway on an old beach chair while my four-year-old brother plays in his turtle sandbox. The sun is warm, but the air is decidedly March-like—crisp and cold; the chilly kind, that gets inside you—and I’m sitting here with a hood over my head wondering what on earth I’m doing out here and how Joseph can bear having nothing on his feet. Maybe the sand is warm. Maybe he’s warmer, somehow. Maybe there’s something in us when we’re young that’s still half-full of Heaven.