Saturday - March 31, 2007

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Who can resist spring? Not us! We’re outside as much as possible. Funny to find a few patches of snow. The kids grab whatever balls of snow they discover on neighbors’ lawns, and toss them at hard surfaces, splattering them. Overhead the wind is blowing its last-days-of-March kite-eating songs, and mostly underfoot is spongy and brown from the remnants of winter, but in between heaven and earth...spring is awakening!

Mommy goes kick-boxing. Jess goes to karate, then plays with friend Sarah Brown. Daddy gets out for an early-morning bike ride in preparation for the Pan Mass Challenge in August. Sarah’s out and about with friend Anna, even going with the Brown family to see the last performance of moonlight productions’ Les Mis!

We’re making the most of the weekend. And not stopping too often to think...what was life like one year ago? Very different. 

Last year on this day, we shared corndogs with our friend Emily. We were living in the hospital while Jessie was treated for a maybe-infection. Emily's mother Jane sometimes took walks to the cafeteria with mommy...our daily jaunts. And to keep Jessie sane, since she felt clinically healthy during this hospitalization, we went outside to the garden and chased bubbles...a lot. And Jessie developed a habit of running through Prouty Garden, doing laps and sprints, sometimes racing mommy or daddy, sometimes racing a stopwatch and measuring how fast she could go. Then back upstairs to an isolation room. Daddy ran back and forth between Ipswich, work and Boston. Sarah attended school, and stayed with the Colters each day until daddy could get home to her. We were living in two worlds. And different emotional realities. 

Soon after Jessie’s spring 2006 hospitalization, our friend Emily died. She died during Holy Week, less than a year ago. “Good Friday” we call it. That’s the day that tradition says Christ died on the cross, and the day that Christians face death in all of its solemnity and grief, and find a place to put our own sorrows and troubles. Well “Good Friday” didn’t feel so good last year. Death was way too close to us. And we couldn’t make euphemistic statements about new life, rebirth, or transformation. We just wanted Emily: whole and living, healed, starting off to college. 

In some ways, we don’t want to make the comparison between last year and this. Today is the end of the month. We flip the page in the calendar. We plan pranks. We start another Holy Week. And we face death again. And hope. And awakening life.

And we believe in it. Every part of the human experience. And we miss our beloved friends. So in our living, we celebrate those who cannot be with us anymore, but who appreciated days like this one, when the woodpecker is upside down, pecking and tapping songs on the tree out back, and a few islands of snow cling to brown blades of grass, and the sky is a cerulean color of blue that comes squirting out of a paint tube and can’t possibly be real, but it is.