Not satisfied with unmucking the boys’ shed yesterday, Xopher worked on rebuilding the front path today.

It’s the summery day we’ve been waiting for.

 

I’m crawling with finches!

… when I proudly post pictures of DIRT!

I think that one’s a magnolia.

Seattle BTW was a long weekend to visit Aunt Alice.  She’s much the same as last time I saw her.  She’s non-verbal, but looked at me deeply when I spoke.

It was a coincidence that Aunt Lou died at the same time that I was scheduled to visit Aunt Alice.  I changed my return flight to hit the funeral in Virginia.

 

This was at the Arboretum in Seattle this past weekend.  I *think* this is a rhododendron, though there’s a chance it could be an azalea; I’m not good at identifying flowering plants.  We basically saw rhododendrons, azaleas, magnolias, and cherry trees.  Larry and I went walking early Sunday morning.  Like most places, it seems, Seattle is much further along in the springtime thing than Vermont.

 

I used to think grieving was just about missing someone.

Or if a person’s life was cut short prematurely, about being upset about that, kind of on their behalf.

So, in my usual dense way, I didn’t have much patience for people making a big deal about somebody old dying that they had never seen fit to even mention before.

Now I realize that grieving is also about stories ending.  That’s the best way I can put it.  When I look at pictures of John, Barbara, Uncle Bill, and Aunt Lou, young and in their prime, I feel sad for their stories being over.

I wasn’t “close” with Aunt Lou, probably never spoke with her over the past 20 years other than the time she came to my wedding and the time she came to Barbara’s funeral.

Our families got together only once or twice a year when I was a child.  So I wasn’t this big part of her “story”, but I was part of it.  I was her sister’s daughter.  I knew her and her story and I was in it.

I look at pictures of their youth, and I know how it turns out.  There’s something just so sad about that.

Maybe it’s like a novel where they put this epilogue and tell you how everyone dies. That’s always kind of annoying, isn’t it?

 

 

 

What a difference HEALTH makes!  What a difference to no longer feel like a role in a commercial where “We’ve secretly replaced Tytania with a pile of crap… let’s watch!”