Another weekend camping trip in the valley, and another wonderful family gathering at the foot of Bull Run Mountain, and another utter failure to take any pictures.  There were tiny blooming wild flowers and happy dogs and wonderful friends, but you’ll just have to trust me on that.  And then there were nieces and a nephew and a happy dog who was once so very unhappy, and brothers and sisters and parents and aunts and a new pond and little fish and lily pads stretching their stems up through the water and great food and a lot of joyous laughter.

There are also some amazing new boots, but I bet I can capture those on film since they are attached to my feet every day or two.  And lots of blooming happening in our garden, and a pleasant amount of rain to make sure the flowers look just so in front of a lens.  This weekend we get together with friends to make an album of photos and remembrances for Mike’s family.  Next weekend we gather with everyone we can find to celebrate and mourn him with his parents and family.  I’m just trying to buck up and keep busy.

I’m trying to pick a new knitting project or two to start; I’ve sketched out a great leather-working project that is so long in coming; I’m still stalled on the cat’s paw rug; I’m most of the way through some boring socks; and I can’t really do much reading yet.  I worry that grieving has remained the top item on my day’s list of accomplishments for far too many days, but I really can’t fathom another way to experience the loss of someone as wonderful as Mike.  So I’m trying to take it very easy on myself.  Not to worry–I don’t have my head in the oven, and Scott and I and all of Mike’s other friends and loved ones are bring careful to check in on each other and tell great stories about our guy and know that he wouldn’t tolerate half of our whinging.  I am just very, very aware that all of us who knew and loved him can no longer deny that death is unavoidable even for us and none of us get to pretend that being one of us is any sort of shield, and what makes it worse is that he’s not sticking it out to the end with his tribe to keep us from being morose.

I liked that immortality trip a lot, you know.  The poetry and songs and mythology and the knitting and sewing are all such obvious grabs at immortality and word fame–if I tried to deny that I know a bunch of people who would laugh in my face.  And yet . . . my hardest and most therapeutic activity at the moment is writing a thing I’m writing about Mike, and also about Deri, and Michelle, and Captian Jim, and Uncle Joe, and Grandpap, and my Grandmother, and James, and so many other people I love but don’t get to see ever again.  And the thing I’m writing is actually a translation of a thing someone else originally started composing 2400 years ago or so, and that other someones learned and changed and improved and loved and sang out to their people.   Because I want them to be remembered, but I want to be remembered with them, as one of them.  Someone who you can’t quite distinguish in the fog of time and language, but whose mouth definitely formed the words just so, and whose neck bent like this when she laughed, and whose walk was all the more right because of an old injury or two, which seemed to vanish when she beat out her rhythms on the floorboards, and whose back was strong and whose hands were deft, and whose eyes were just that color, just like yours.

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