Dawn's Notes
The Gray and the Green - August 2020
by Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW
The article below was written by my granddaughter Audrey Joy Elliott in 2014 when she was eleven years old. She and her family live in Wales and were home on furlough for a year when she wrote the article for me. She is a great little writer, and one sentence in her article has stuck with me. I underlined the sentence.
Think of two colors: gray and green. When I say the word gray, what country comes to your mind? And when I say the word green, what country do you think of?
When I was eight, I moved to Wales in the United Kingdom. I am eleven now and back in the U.S. until next summer. But since I have been in Wales for three years, when someone says gray, I think of the gray skies and drizzly rain. It’s always raining in Wales, but it rarely really pours with rain. But when it does, people will say, “It’s tippin’ outside!”
When someone says green, I think of the soft grass that covers the valleys and the hills of Wales. And because of all the rain, the grass stays green all year long. Without the gray, there would be no green. And without the green, there would be no joy in the gray.
I like the rain, but I have to admit, I don’t like it all the time because it can get very annoying. In the few times the sun does shine, it is absolutely beautiful. And if it is warm enough, everybody will go to the beach.
In the three years my family was in Wales, I lived in Cardiff, the capitol of Wales. The first house I lived in was in a town called Llandaff. Then we moved to a smaller town called Danescourt, both of which are in Cardiff.
If you ever were to visit Wales, the people will probably greet you in strange and unusual ways such as these. “Alright?” is one of them. You would normally use this to say “hello.”
If you were to say “thank you,” you would say “Cheers!” and occasionally, people would use “Cheers” to say “good-bye.” If you want to be more posh and English, you would say “Cheerio!” You would usually use these words with another greeting or strange word. It would leave you with either “Alright or Cheers!”….
Wales is known for its coal mines, and they used to allow small children, boys or girls, at the age of five or six and up, to work down in the mines. After some time, girls weren’t allowed to work in the mines, but the boys still were. Anyway, what the children would do was open and close the doors to let the mining carts in and out.
But they weren’t allowed to use candles in case there were certain gases that can cause explosions. So they were in total darkness, all day long, with no one with them. But the miners had to make sure they didn’t wander away from the door or couldn’t find the door to open it. So in order to prevent that from happening, they would tie the kids to the door with a rope around their waists. These children were called Butties….
It’s time for this story to come to a close, but I hope you enjoyed my tale about gray and green and other Welsh tidbits.
Audrey’s original article had other interesting information about Wales, but the underlined sentence has stuck with me. Without the gray, there would be no green. And without the green, there would be no joy in the gray.
Think about it. Without the gray, the rain and the storms of life, there would be no moisture to promote growth and the green. And without the green that causes the grass in Wales to grow, there would be no beauty in the landscapes. The green hillsides and grazing sheep provide a picturesque scene of beauty, peace, and serenity.
Life holds both joy and sorrow, the green and the gray. And we learn to appreciate the good times even more after we have experienced the sad times. We also learn what is most important during our times of sadness.
If someone you love has died, as Audrey’s article says, the rain may be pouring, “tippin’” on you, but storms never last forever. The green follows the gray. Hopefully your green is right around the corner. Peace and joy can come. There is hope—broken hearts do heal.
Call about the next "Living Life after Loss" Group at:
Meadowlark Hospice
709 Liberty, Clay Center, Kansas
(785) 632-2225
Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW, Group Facilitator