Feel the Love

Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?

Today’s blog prompt primes the proverbial pump. After all, Rosslyn is filled with love! Our 2006 decision to purchase the property to create our home was an extension of the love that Susan and I felt for one another. And our endless historic rehabilitation has been a labor of love since the get-go. As a hub for our love of family and friends, Rosslyn has over-performed year after year, drawing her tribe together to celebrate life’s joyful events: birthdays, holidays, sunny summer days, snowy winter days, and loving, memory-making moments as diverse as the people she nurtures and nourishes.

This profound, if often platonic love is an enduring and abundant feeling of affection. A sense of sanctuary. Comfort. Belonging. Rosslyn is an oasis, warm and welcoming, that acknowledges and recognizes. An oasis that cultivates relationships.

For eighteen year this coming summer, our Rosslyn relationships have featured front and center in Susan’s life and my life. Pam Murphy, often celebrated in these Rosslyn Redux posts, is one of these especial souls we’ve been fortunate to know and love because of Rosslyn. The property drew us together some years ago, and the relationship has evolved and enriched our lives more with each passing year. This friendship offers the backdrop for today’s post. The response to today’s prompt, “a positive example of where you’ve felt loved”, is illustrated in the photographs above and below.

Gifts. Pam has showered us with gifts over the years, some conscious and intentional, but often others are unconscious, inadvertent fruits of her positive energy and generosity. But the gifts in today’s post stand out for me.

Let’s start with the antique ice tongs that Pam is holding above. This gift represents not only the perfect art/artifact to adorn Rosslyn’s icehouse, an ambitious and mesmerizingly successful historic rehabilitation project that Pam managed for me in 2022-3, but it is actually a family heirloom that Pam’s father inherited from his father. I’d like to imagine that it was used by Pam‘s grandfather. And whether or not it actually was, the fact that it was an antique kept, preserved, and passed down across generations in Pam’s family, and that they have now gifted it to us, imbues it with more meaning and generosity than words can accurately convey.

In a real sense this antique artifact is a time tempered trophy honoring our shared adventure and conjoining Rosslyn, Pam, Pam’s family, and Susan and my family. It is a distinct privilege to exhibit this gift and the icehouse.

And the tongs were accompanied by these unanticipated beauties, custom etched glasses that, like the ice tongs, memorialize an accomplishment, a dream transformed into reality.

Receiving these gifts from Pam this past Christmas moved me deeply. Revisiting the photographs today and looking at Pam’s smile as she holds the ice tongs (in front of an historic photograph that includes an antique ice saw and steel ice tongs virtually identical to the ones now displayed in the icehouse) I feel loved. So much respect and recognition in these gifts. Feeling seen and understood. Sharing a completed quest in common — an immensely challenging journey from concept through planning, permitting, setbacks, accomplishments, hurdles, and ultimately the icehouse’s exceptionally successful execution — as well as a deep sense of pride in the finished project and a well earned respect for one another.

What a gift. I feel the love!