My dear sister, Christine, passed in August of 2020. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t miss her. Her daughter, Reta, wrote this poem that perfectly describes her. She has penned the words where I’m bereft of poetic vocabulary.
March is my dad’s birthday month. He had Alzheimer’s in his last years and was lost to our reality most of the time. We missed his wit and academic wisdom. My mother had always surpassed him in the brass-tacks wisdom department! Be that as it may, the world my father inhabited in the grips of Alzheimer’s wasn’t this one, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real to him.
I so enjoy having children visit my garden. They absorb droplets of joy like a bird drinking from a birdbath. I especially love their inquisitive follow-up questions to whatever I’m saying to them!
As a very young child, we lived in an apartment in Beirut, Lebanon on a school campus (BBS, Beirut Baptist School). My parents had started this school in the garage of the apartment building which ran parallel to a main thoroughfare leading to Beirut’s old downtown.
Worn, wrinkled, spotted, and knobby hands on top of my equally worn, wrinkled bible praying and praying some more.
It’s a cold and crisp, sunshine day. The garden is holding its breath for the first sign of spring.