Scars of the Physical and Emotional Variety

Today I am grateful for my stepdaughter Emily, on this, her 18th birthday. I appreciate getting to know her better and spend more time with her in recent months. I am also grateful for my ears, with which I can listen to others.

I guess I am still thinking about the earthly vehicle I referred to in yesterday's post, and about scars of the physical variety. I have numerous scars on both knees from the many tumbles I took while riding bike on gravel roads when I was growing up. If you have done the same thing, you probably recall the painful job of picking pieces of gravel out of your skinned knees.

I have a scar on the index finger of my right hand from my pre-teen days. We used to get up on the roof of the chicken house on our farm. That was easy enough, it wasn't very high. But on one of these trips I caught a sharp corner and got a nasty cut.

During the basketball season my sophomore year of high school. I was going for a loose ball and my nose collided with the forehead of an opponent. I bled, got stitches, then got two crimson and purple black eyes. A couple of days later, we discovered my nose was broken as well. One thing I didn't get that I wish I would have at that time was a picture of me with those black eyes. My nose was sore and sensitive for months. I remember taking a ground ball to the nose during the following summer's softball season and it being quite painful. The scar was a short, straight one across the bridge of my nose.

Some of these scars have faded and some others I couldn't give you the specifics on how I got them.My most prominent physical scars today are my right and left mastectomy scars. Most days I barely notice them. They are just a part of me and a part of my life story.

I'll take physical scars over emotional ones. Emotional ones are much more jagged and painful and they take longer to heal. None of us is spared from either kind of scar, but my hope is that you don't have too many of either.

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