An Unfinished House

My dear friend and indefatigable supporter, Nelmi Artiaga, died last Monday. From what, no one really knows. She had been fighting chronic illness of some sort or another and had been in and out of the hospital for the past year. I am told that this past month she lost a tremendous amount of weight, bled profusely from random orifices and simply stopped eating. Nelmi leaves behind 4 children, 3 of whom are under the age of 15, and a serious void in the Los Laureles community. Always aglow with joy, always a servant, always eager to chat - Nelmi was dearly loved by everyone in the community and people there tell me that already the place seems a little deader without her laughter and quick wit. For my part, I balled when I got the call from her sister last week. Nelmi was one of the first adults to befriend me and her friendship was rock-solid; when I lived in the community she would stop by the house occasionally just to check-up on me, when ugly and false rumo...

I'm a sentimentalist at heart and can rarely be content with the way things are "in-the-moment". In my heart I have this constant nagging suspicion that the present state of things is an aberration, a fall or slide of sorts from a more perfect time when things were more as they ought to be. I often feel as though the organizations I choose to associate with are in their death-throws and that if I could only wind back the clock a bit I might be a part of something that were in its heyday. I feel this way about my beloved city of Williamsport, about the recreational Summer swim team that I'm currently coaching, about the Mennonite Church at-large and my own home congregation, about our public school system here; heck I even get the feeling sometimes that the Lycoming Creek that flows through the City is less full than what I remember as a child. And I don't wish to turn back time to a specific date, though I do get the sense that I would have loved living in ...