September 14, 2008 12:17 am
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It is a difficult thing to explain tears in your eyes and a smile in your heart.
So many of you who knew Fiona Ward because of my magazine and books and my Web site have met her. She was tragically lost to me and her countless other friends in a recent accident.
The tears are easy to understand, the smile perhaps is not. It comes because Fiona will always be here for those of us who got to know her well. It is there because for the past five years she has been a light in my life, a friend whom I could not have done without, in so many ways.
If you knew Fiona, she put a smile in your heart that will never go away.
I met her because she read my newspaper columns and wanted to get a Labrador from me.
I asked her to help me with my Web site in return for the Lab puppy, and she showed me how to do some things I had been trying to do in getting a fledgling outdoor magazine started.
She knew so much about what I knew so little about, and helped me accomplish things I could not do. She was so smart, so capable. She amazed me. She made insurmountable mountains into little hills.
Fiona had been working for years in her husband’s law office, and when he died of cancer, also too young, she agreed to help me with my publishing company. Between her and Dorothy Loges, there was no problem which came up they couldn’t take care of. I wrote, Fiona and Dorothy did the rest.
In time, I found out how she had been born in Oregon, and loved Mount Hood, where she spent much of her youth hiking and skiing with her father. As a young woman she went to Alaska to work for Alaskan Airlines, and she loved the outdoors wherever she went.
She told me all about salmon fishing, and you could see she had the soul of an outdoorsman.
Quite often, I couldn’t afford to pay her what she was worth to me. There was always Fiona to make something work that I couldn’t understand.
It got to a point where people involved in the technical aspect of printing or selling my books and magazines would quit trying to explain things to me and simply say, “Ask Fiona…”
And so, sometimes I paid her by taking her hunting and fishing when I could. She lived so far away she couldn’t often get here early, so she came late. It didn’t matter.
On her first turkey hunting trip we didn’t get in the woods until late in the morning, but the turkeys gobbled, and came to the call, and she killed her first gobbler close to noon.
I think nature knew Fiona was there, and she deserved it. She killed several more over the years. And then in the summer it was her first big smallmouth, in the middle of the day also. Again there were more to come.
The river seemed to know Fiona was there, and she deserved it. In the fall she got to hunt doves for the first time, with her young Lab, Barlow, which she had trained so well. She named the pup after a trail in Oregon which her great grandfather had helped build.
You should have seen her face with that first turkey, and again with that first big bass. Her smile lit up the woods and the river. I have never seen anyone so happy. It was an even bigger smile when she killed her first pair of mallards, and watched her dog retrieve them.
She giggled like a youngster.
Fiona took to it like no one I have ever seen; she was a born outdoorsman.
She learned everything about the outdoors so fast, and loved every minute she was there. In a matter of days she learned to paddle a canoe perfectly from one side, and on our interpretive float trips, she fit in with five other male guides to a point where our guests thought she had grown up on the river with the rest of us.
All the guides loved her, as did our guests. Everyone wanted to float with either Uncle Norten or Fiona. What a pair the two of them made. She said he brought her dad back to her.
She loved only one thing more than the outdoors… her kids and her friends. Never in all the days I knew her did she put anything above Sam and Sydney, nor the close friends around her.
Never did she ever say a bad word, a criticizing sentence, about anyone…not once, not ever.
If a friend needed Fiona, everything else was put aside. If I had a problem with my magazine or books, if I couldn’t figure out how to make it all work, Fiona was there to straighten it out.
When she went with me to public speaking engagements to sell books, so I could sign them and talk to folks around me, I saw how folks were drawn to Fiona. Book sales always went up when she went along.
A few months ago, Fiona took a job in her local courthouse, helping those who few people wanted to help, offenders of the law who received community service sentences, down and outers who didn’t interest many. Fiona wanted to help them all.
I don’t know exactly what was involved, but the last time we talked, she told me how the money wasn’t enough for the work, but the job was worth all the effort because the people there were so in need of help, so neglected by others who saw them only as a problem.
Fiona gave them that smile, that love of others that was born in her, and she didn’t even know she had. Fiona told me…. “I feel so good about what I am doing… I am helping those who feel there is no place to go for help”.
It was one of our last conversations.
And so it is, that I am filled with tears, and yet deep within me there is also a smile…Fiona’s smile. Sunshine inside me, a storm without.
And though I am tempted to say, “God, what were you thinking?”.. I am quick to realize He knows all about Fiona, and she is with Him. I don’t understand, but I don’t have to.
All our years on earth amount to a fleeting passing of time, and it matters not how many turkeys we have bagged and how many bass we have taken.
It just matters that we have seen God’s greatest creation and loved it, and partaken of it, and knew what gifts they were, the turkeys and the fish and the wild ducks.
It only matters that we have seen it and heard it and felt it, that we have seen the sunrises over distant timbered hills, and heard the singing of wild birds, and seen the soaring eagles above us… not so much how often, or how long.
It isn’t so much the time we have together with those who mean so much to us; it is that we have that time, that we know there is a continuance to things which has no time span. There is no end to that which is good. We all have other days coming, together when the imperfections known here are gone and forgotten.
Not long ago, Fiona, who always was conscious of doing what God wanted her to do, was baptized in a river not far from her home with her children, wanting to follow the footsteps of One whom she believed in.
No matter the years to come here, we all who knew her have a hug coming from Fiona, and a bright smile just as real as the ones she gave us here.
It will happen soon enough. The tears will dry, the smile will last forever.
Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@alltel.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemont.com, or call (417) 777-5227.
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