Last Day of Testing

Today was the last day of Kieron's STAR testing down in town, so we got to go to the park with the young ones and feed the ducks and geese. We call them "Paddy's army".

It was a beautiful day, warmer than it is up here with the snow still on the deck!










There were ten little baby ducklings! This was the best picture I could get. My zoom feature is rudimentary.

Life continues to be busy for a while, with Brendan going into finals week and Clare coming home from college.

I have been struggling with sadness -- I don't know if it comes across from reading this blog. Last Tuesday was the first anniversary of my father's death. I miss him so much. Sometimes he seems so close and sometimes so far away. I can't put the feeling into words, so I'll use some of CS Lewis's:

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.

It feels a lot like waiting. Life keeps going ... I love my husband and children, framed with morning light, giving bread to the ducks, and that is real enough, but the minutes inside seem to tick by to a different clock. There's like an eternity inside that easily passing stream of time. The twisting in my stomach, the sudden shortness of breath, is a lot like suspense, only without the anticipatory edge. I can only imagine how it feels to my mother. They were the closest couple I know. When I talked to her recently she said it wasn't as bad as she expected, but then, we also discussed how easily that can turn around in a moment.

Then comes a sudden job of red-hot memory and all this "commonsense" vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.