(c) June 2012
“Yesterday it did not seem as if today it would be raining.”
Last night actually did give just a hint of rain, after a glorious evening outside at Prescott Park in Portsmouth. This time Shawn Colvin was not driven from the stage by lightning.
And today it is not raining; it is a perfect summer day, and one of my sons is leading a pack of children up a magnificent mountain.
But I don’t believe Edward Gorey was speaking of the weather. I think he was addressing those unpredictable, turn-on-a-dime reversals in life that almost all of us will experience and witness with the people we love most.
Today is an odd kind of anniversary, which left its mark like only a handful of other days has. The word “anniversary” itself seems too inherently festive, because there is nothing celebratory about this day.
It is not the day we found out that my husband’s condition was decisively incurable. That came a handful of months later. But on this calendar date, after several hours of waiting for a CAT scan at a hospital outside Boston, a surgeon pointed to the image of Jim’s pancreas on her computer screen in a windowless room and said, gently, “This is your tumor.”
Love in the Spaces 