Thursday Notes: #12
Four Years And Counting
Happy anniversary to my beloved Mark!
Four years ago today, we gathered in a barn on the Mendocino coast with several hundred of our closest friends and relatives and began this journey–or, really, codified the journey that had already been underway since 2009.
Here’s to many more years!
And I love my “farmer’s tan” in these photos…I’d spent quite a lot of time that summer in the garden. In addition to rewriting Our Lady of the Islands, and working crazy freelance hours, and “helping” Mark rebuild our deck, and thinking about Orcas Island…everything seemed to be happening, back in 2014. That was when we’d just spent the winter months here on the island, our first real extended time here, keeping the Blue Heron Bed & Breakfast for our friends. When we decided that we REALLY had to move here…someday.
Hard to believe we are here, that we live here now. Time is funny. Four years ago…it seems both shorter and longer than that.
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For a sadder topic…last week was Mom’s memorial in California. It went really well (if you discount the fact that it would have never had to happen if Mom were still here with us). So many people came, and said so many nice things, both to the group and to me privately. Mom touched quite a number of lives–more than I realized, given that she and my stepdad weren’t great social extroverts. I know she would have loved the service–the songs, the photos, the words.
I continue to do all right with the loss, I guess. I mean, I don’t know? I feel sad; I sometimes feel angry; I sometimes forget she’s gone, and then remember poignantly or painfully.
It’s been three months. I know that’s not long, but–that funny time thing again–also it feels like forever ago, that time, being with her during her last days, when she was so sick and uncomfortable, and then so confused and sick and uncomfortable, and then mostly sleeping… That was a weird time-out-of-time. I’m sorry she had to suffer so much; I’m glad she didn’t suffer longer.
Mom, on the right, dancing with her sister (my auntie Susan), four years ago tonight.
Forever ago. So recent.