I'LL TAKE BEAUTY

This has been a run of tough days; Mother's Day, May 12 and six months, not only is it another Friday today, it's also Friday the 13th.  Not that that matters. Got some information about the class John and I will teach at NMU this summer during the third week of June.  Time to get that all organized; I have folders full of materials as well as computer files; just a matter of updating it and deciding what to use.  

Today I had lunch at Macy's with the friends from the old neighborhood.  They're good friends, always warm and welcoming, yet I still feel a little out of place with them. Lately I've been talking with friends who are in a similar situation to mine, and we agree that as time goes by the fact of our spouses' death is never far from our mind yet we find ways to function in world that has for the most part pretty much forgotten your great loss.  I'm lucky because many of my family and friends  tell me that they think about me and Gwen every day.  Yet, as happens each Friday night, all the memories of that Friday night in November come flooding back.  I am reminded again of the ugliness of cancer and the beautiful woman that accompanied me all those years.  Cancer had its ugly way with her, but her beauty survives in so many ways--her precious grandchildren, her children, her friends, her love of the spring in full bloom that I see out the window right now. This little poem came to me all at once:

I’LL TAKE BEAUTY

Ugly has its own voice

I need never recognize it.

How can we not know its presence?

It is so tiresome.

Beauty, now that

gets all my attention;

it appears when it chooses

and leaves on a whim.

John A. Bayerl, May 13, 2011

Tonight I miss you more than ever, Dear; we'll talk later.  Right now I'm in the middle of doing some laundry, you'll be pleased to know that it's been quite a while since I shrunk anything or mixed a red shirt in with the white shirts.