"Picture Angel"
We moved to Greenville, Kentucky and the first house we lived in was small and had a huge yard of a little over an acre, which took hours to mow. We stayed there only a couple of months, but it was in the heat of a very hot summer. Marshall and Shirley had bought a house and were just waiting for it to close so we could move in.
The new house was great. It was in a typical blue collar middle-class neighborhood. We painted the whole inside of the house, and I got to pick the color of my room, an awesome gold color which I really liked. There were lots of kids and a vacant lot across the street that we used as our ball field. A couple of blocks down was a huge field with a large hill we all used as a bicycle trail with lots of jumps.
I’ll never forget the house up the hill from us. It was a very poor house. It had a dirt floor. The kids were poor but seemed happy. It made me think of the house Marshall grew up in.
We took trips almost every summer. We went to Disneyworld in Florida, circumnavigating the state all the way to Key West, and we were there during Hurricane Agnes.
At one point, we were driving by Miami but didn’t stop. An overwhelming feeling came over me like Miami Beach was important to me and I asked if we could stop to see it, but we didn’t.
We took a trip up through Pennsylvania to see Marshall’s sister and her husband at State College where he was a professor. Then on to Washington D.C., where we saw a lot of the sites including the new Air and Space Museum, which Marshall loved, as we all did.
At one point, when in Washington D.C., Shirley decided to take my picture and asked me to stand for it. I did so but noticed a post a little over waist high next to me and decided to put my arm on it to frame the picture that way.
Shirley got upset with me and told me to put my arm down. I did so but almost immediately I felt someone from behind me take my arm and put it back on the post.
Then a voice said to me, “You can leave it there, it will be ok”.
Shirley yelled at me to put it down again, but I just stayed with my arm on the post. She took the shot anyway but wasn’t very happy about it.
I turned to look behind me to see who put my arm back on the post and there he was, in the spirit, the angel that had given me the sword and whom I referred to as the “Mr. Clean Angel”. I knew right then he was my guardian angel and had been with me all along.
I asked him, what was the deal with me leaving my arm on the post during the picture thing? He told me that in twenty years I would understand.