August 4, 2012

Well, I am home, and glad to be here.  It seems as though I had been away forever.  It started out as vacation for my husband's reunion and to see everyone in Tulsa, but ended up with my Mom being very ill and going home to take care of her.  She died, from a short bout with cancer, on July 19th.  It's so hard to know what to say, I will miss her, and was glad to be with her, and the people from the hospice care were all truly helpful and wonderful to us.  I am sure I am not any where finished dealing with my feelings, or getting through this time, but being home is certainly going to help, and getting back into some sort of my routine.  I postponed my eye surgery to go home to Mom and so I still have that to do and will get it set up again, but I wanted to have a few days of normal things before I started anything else out of the ordinary.  I missed being in touch this way with all of you. 

So today it's like looking at a new backyard, even the most familiar things look new again.  There is a LOT of shade now that it's full summer, and all the trees have all the leaves they are going to have.  The crepe myrtle are raining down tiny pink and white curly-petaled flowers.  You can watch them fall down kind of like flower rain.  The grass is remarkably green for having so little sun, but there has evidently been a lot of rain while I was gone.  The cane is summer-tall but not blooming yet, though the stalks are mostly green now, and my husband has evidently been very good about cutting down the new ones, as there are not any new ones poking up at the moment.  Michael took the canoe with him when he came home to take some more of his stuff, so now the water bowl sits on an old cooler and I have only seen one blue jay and one mockingbird take a splash in it.  The yard is very quiet, even the cat is not in evidence.  I guess it's probably too hot for a lot of activity.  There are huge banks of white cloud across the deep summer blue that sometime give us a few moments of overall shade, but nothing looking too stormy yet.

This is a difficult day to find a poem, too much I want to say, too much I need from all those words that have been written and yet sometimes seem too far away. 

From Mala of the Heart

I know a cure for sadness.

Let your hands touch something that

makes your eyes smile.

I bet there are a hundred objects close by

that can do that.

Look at

beauty's gift to us --

her power is so great she enlivens

the earth, the sky,

our soul.

Mirabai

This one, the beauty of creation just outside my window, the thought of so much love in the world I can reach out and touch it with words, connect to the people I love with this morning note that comforts me, the routine of that connection I have missed and sorely needed.  A gift that will always remain beyond words.