Here’s something Xopher found a few years ago: a Dutch map of Nieuw Belgium from 1682:

(The words that follow are his.)

There are two fronts of exploration shown here, both based on water. One is from the south, the other from the Northeast. From the south one finds the Hudson and Connecticut rivers; from the Northeast, the Saint Lawrence and its tributaries.

The year was 1682; the Marine chronometer would not be invented for another eighty years. Distances east and west could only be estimated by travel times. And it’s a long, long way from Cape Cod to the mouth of the Saint Lawrence.

The result is that the bounds of Vermont, the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, are both shown on the map, but *in the wrong order*. From this we can conclude that no European explorers had yet journeyed between the two.

If you had said that you had come from a land east of Meer de Irocoisen and west of the Versche Rivier, people would say, there is no such place!

 

Second-guessing and doubt and guilt arise when you think, “I shoulda” or “I shouldn’ta”.

Shoulda shoulda shoulda…

Shoulda done this instead of that.

Shoulda gone somewhere else.

Shoulda stayed home.

Shoulda done something productive.

But if you think of the gazillion parallel lives that branch out from every moment…  your path forward is like a set of dominoes falling straight ahead.  But from either side of you, at every moment, you flip another domino, and another series of dominoes falls off to the side.

Surely of those gazillion parallel lives, some would be better, by any objective criteria, than the one you’re in.  Some would be worse.

What sense does it make to regret even one of those gazillion paths not taken?  When there are simultaneously a gazillion better paths and a gazillion worse paths?  A true infinity of a variety of paths.

 

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?