This morning I realized that it has been exactly one year since we traveled as a family.
This week is a school break week here in Maine and last year at this time Carrie, myself and our youngest daughter, Kittiey, drove to Georgia to see our oldest daughter, Emily, who was in the Army and stationed at Ft. Benning at the time.
After spending a couple of days with Emily we drove to Florida to spend the remainder of our vacation and see my family.
Shortly after returning from that trip, Carrie and I managed to spend a weekend in Portland Maine for her birthday. Since then, none of the three of us (Emily is currently isolated at Tuck University getting her MBA.) have traveled more than forty miles away from our house.
Both of those trips out of the house were for specialized dentist appointments and other than those joyous trips to the dentist, none of us has gone more than twenty miles away from the house and all of these trips are for curbside grocery pickup at the nearest Walmart. Curse you for this involuntary hermitic existence COVID-19!
While it may seem as though I am complaining, and I am a little bit because we all love to travel and see new people and places, complaining is not what this blog is about.
It is about love, the miraculous fact that while we are in constant contact with each other (Kittiey is 100 percent remote learning), we all still love each other and nothing has drastically changed in how we feel about each other, unless it is a deeper understanding of patience.
To me, that is a testament to the power of love!
After all, love is the mother of all things good; kindness, empathy, compassion and understanding. Honestly, I am a little surprised by our success in continued friendship through this last year and I am supremely happy about the results!
For those of you who may have suffered far more than anyone should ever have to, I offer my greatest condolences and wishes for better times.
Even without COVID-19 the world faces a myriad of disasters every day and somehow humans have always managed to survive the unthinkable forces working against us.
Why?
Because we are capable of loving one another.
We are capable of being compassionate and empathetic to one another. We are capable of respecting one another.
We don’t need to be in love or to even feel love in order to make another feel loved or cared about, we simply need to remember that the most powerful love is the love that we give to another, without expectation of obligation or return.
We must simply remember and realize that love is the greatest gift and the greatest investment! Always, love your way through it.
Shaun

LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Email us at carriejonesbooks@gmail.com
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.
Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?
And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.
And Carrie has new books out! Yay!
You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!

It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.
And that one is called THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series. I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!
