“When my grandma got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa does it for her now all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love.”  Love is where you find it.

   “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.”  Love is where you find it

   It all started with an apple packing company’s search for a model—a new label was needed for their boxes.  Two sisters were asked to pose and to the surprise of the younger, she was chosen.  Her plump little hands were endearing wrapped around an apple. 

   The small, round hands slendered and matured.  Her high school sweetheart was drafted and sent overseas.  She faithfully wrote to him and waited for him to come home.  Half way around the world, he lived through horrific events and became very dispirited.  One day while unloading supply trucks, he threw the tarps back and saw the truck loaded with apple boxes—and the picture of his high school sweetheart smiling back at him.  He shouted to his buddies, “That’s my girlfriend!  That’s my girlfriend!” His spirits were encouraged by her smile.  They married when he returned and will soon celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary.  Love is where you find it.

   The father tells the same jokes again and again.  The kids beg their mother not to laugh at them and encourage his idiocy; and though she remembers the punch lines better than he, she still laughs.  Not because the jokes aren’t stale, but because he still tries to make her smile—and that makes all the difference.  Love is where you find it.

courtesy of Rick Ruggles

   She lay on the couch slowly withering from cancer, barely weighing seventy pounds.  With nothing but gosling fuzz for hair, she carefully smiled when her daughter and friends entered the room.  Tubes carried fluids in and out of her body as she welcomed them home from school.  Her daughter softly asked her mother how she was feeling and then led her friends downstairs to the game room.  One friend came back upstairs to get a drink just as the father came home from work.  A tall, masculine man, he went straight to his dying wife’s side, knelt next to her, told her how beautiful she was, and then affectionately kissed her forehead, cheeks, nose, and eyes as he gently comforted her.  The friend cried watching the husband’s tenderness.  Love is where you find it.

   Winslow Homer had always enjoyed painting, but his father was a practical father and did not think art a wise profession to follow, so Winslow apprenticed out as a lithographer.  Winslow’s father lost his job, and though Winslow was miserable and hated his job as a lithographer, he kept it to help his family.

   After his five year apprenticeship ended, Winslow decided to try it as an artist—a painter.  He saved up enough money to give him a few months to try his hand.  He worked very hard to get his first picture finished and then took it to a store to sell it.  He wrote his brother a letter that said he’d done his best on the painting and had given it his honest effort.  He said that if the picture sold he would continue to paint, if not he would go back to the lithographer and do his best at that. 

   Winslow waited for two weeks before he got up the courage to go back to the store that held his painting.  He was too nervous to look inside, so he kept walking until he had completely run out of money.  Finally, he went into the store and the storekeeper said, “Oh, I’m glad you’ve come.  Your painting has sold and we would like another!”  Winslow was thrilled.  Overcome.  He wrote his brother and told him of his good fortune.  He drew more pictures and delivered them to Harper’s Weekly, the noted magazine of the day.  They admired his work and contracted him to illustrate for them.  He went on to become one of America’s most famous artists—Bill Gates recently purchased one of his pictures for 30 million dollars—the highest price for any American painting.

   But, Winslow would have never gotten the courage to paint without that first picture selling.  He never found out that it was his brother who had driven many, many miles to buy the painting to give him the encouragement to go on.  Love is where you find it.