New Day
I was on fire yesterday. The day started with my usual one-mile power walk. Then I fired up my new power washer. Manpower and horsepower. I washed the drive, the garage, the front porch, the dog run, the back porch. I washed the walls in the garage. I washed the walls on the dog run. I washed windows and doors. It took four tanks of gas to get it all done. But there it is, clean and sparkly.
And now, on the first day of what will be the second year of life without my wife, I literally have a clean slate. The house my wife and I built is tidied up, and only a little worse for wear, with a nice patina of memories to make it extra warm and inviting. And on Saturday my kids and my cousins will come. We will talk about the departed, my wife, their mother, their cousin; and we will have in common the other departed, my father and mother, their aunt and uncle, their mothers and fathers, my aunts and uncles.
It seems a good way to end a long year. The cousins missed the funeral because of covid as did the friends of my wife and me. But over the year those friends and I have gathered in much the same fashion as we will Saturday and remembered our girl. And we’ll do it again Saturday, with family and a few new friends, who would have come to the funeral as well, except they couldn’t. And there will be children who know nothing about the departed except what they see in the eyes of the living. And together we will start making new memories with the past as our template.