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Remembering Anna Marie Nelson (1930-2024)

Please share your tributes, recollections and photos in the comments section below.


Our dear mother Anna Maria Nelson went to be with the Lord on Sunday February 4, 2024 at the age of 93. She was a kind, gentle, and generous lady who loved animals and music. Although she suffered a great deal during her later years from severe arthritis and dementia, Mom continued to love her family and her cats. Her son and daughter-in-law Janis and Ed Nelson faithfully cared for her during her last years in Katy, Texas.They visited her regularly, loving and serving her in so many ways until the very .end. My brother Ed and I are grateful to the many friends who prayed for her these past few years. Ed was with her, reading the Bible to her as she breathed her last and entered into glory. All who knew her loved her.

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Remembering Melvin C. Nelson (1927-2021)

Please share your tributes, recollections and photos in the comments section below.


Mel Nelson was born in Kearny, New Jersey in 1927. He was an only child, grew up in a Swedish immigrant family and in an immigrant neighborhood. He went to a Swedish Baptist Church until he was about 10 years old when the family made the switch to an American Baptist Church. He was a Boy Scout and had a band of friends in the neighborhood who roasted “mickeys”(apples pilfered from a neighbors tree) and swam in the meadows (read “swamp”) nearby. He was proud of the fact that when he visited his ailing grandparents in California, he taught the local kids how to make slingshots. The birds, squirrels, windows and parents were probably not very happy with this East Coast Technology transfer. Dad graduated at 16 because he skipped 2 grades in elementary school. He got right to work as a chemical technician.

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It Runs in the Family

Let each generation tell its children of your mighty acts; let them proclaim your power. I will meditate on your majestic, glorious splendor and your wonderful miracles. Your awe-inspiring deeds will be on every tongue; I will proclaim your greatness. Everyone will share the story of your wonderful goodness; they will sing about your righteousness. – Psalm 145: 4-7

Most doctors take a dim view of the self-diagnoses certain of us love to make with the help of the internet. When I’m afflicted with one thing or another, I usually get caught up in some late-night online symptom sleuthing. My findings are quite often hair-raising and only serve to add to my insomnia.

And when at last I do get in to see my doctor, I helpfully supply my own personal diagnosis of the ailment that has brought me to her office.

Problem is, most of the time I’m wrong.

The physical therapist I saw last week corrected my assessment of my current problem. The trouble was not the flare-up of plantar fasciitis I had so confidently advised him I had. He looked at an x-ray and let me know that the real reason every step I take feels like a demon is driving a nail into my heel is because I have a bone spur.

And, now that I think about it, it wasn’t actually shingles that other time, nor was it skin cancer the time before. Maybe I should just abandon my amateur practice of worst-case scenario medicine and leave the diagnosing to the professionals. ( I do love this advice from a sage friend regarding alarmist tendencies when facing ailments and disorders: when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras!).

A New Diagnosis

But this time it’s different. Todays’s web-surfing helped me with a self-diagnosis I am sure is 100% accurate.

I have thalassophilia.

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When Grey Turns Glorious

When Grey Turns Glorious
When grey turns glorious
it gets a new name.Winter sky and sea.
On this day there is coolness, but no chill.
Hard to put a name to the color spread before me.
Then suddenly I see that behind those clouds
the sun is shining still.All that’s grey becomes silver
When it is infused with that light!
When God sends the sparkle and shine,
It turns shimmery, silvery
Glistening bright.Lord, when my seasons turn to coolness and grey,
When there is limited warmth in my sunless day,
To the denseness and drear, send your brilliant light
To illuminate the clouds that surround.

The gleam of your glory,
Made manifest in silver.

~ Gail Bones