The Greatest Thing About My Father-in-Law…

…is the way he communicates.

A few months before I married Dwight, my father-in-law, Dwight Garland Sr. and I were sitting at his kitchen table. He was about to cut a bell pepper.

“Do you know how to cut one of these?” he asked.

Still new to this family and environment, I shook my head no.

“Well, let me show you.”

He carefully held the green pepper in his hand and showed me the top.

“See what you do is cut right around the top here. All the way around.”

He took the knife and cut a circle away from but around the stem. I looked on as if it were a major operation.

“Now, you pull this,” he said as he removed the stem from the bulbous part of the pepper. “See,” he turned the insides so I could see them. “All the seeds are right here.”

You would’ve thought he was David Blaine and I’d just seen him put a knife through his hand. I was amazed. To this day, that’s how I cut all peppers, and every time I do, I think about my father-in-law and this lesson.

It’s true that you’ll never forget how people made you feel. I’ll always remember that moment because he didn’t say, let me show you the right way to cut a pepper. He didn’t make me feel like some wayward child whose parents had neglected to teach her how to cut vegetables.

He simply asked me if I’d ever cut one, and then lovingly showed me how.