recovery

It's Friday morning, fresh out still but soon will be hot, far too hot for mid-May, record breaking heat. I brought the plants that winter indoors outside and then was afraid they'd shrivel in the relentless sun and set up umbrellas to protect them, especially the 9 foot tall oleander that's like a big green bushy friend. I'm smelling the lilacs and listening to the birds and gradually recovering from last week. 

Patsy is gone; there's an empty space where she used to be. My friend who had cancer surgery is recovering. The reports on the conference were all raves. I've seen my beloved Annie, had a glass of wine on the deck with Monique, called Ken, Skyped with Lynn, taught three classes. I began to deal with a complicated legal issue I'll tell you about sometime and spent much of Wednesday planting tomatoes, peas, cukes of course, lettuce, spices, and three dahlias that were a gift from my tenant Robin's mother - and really felt it in my grubby body at the end of the day. 

It's gradually draining away, the grief and shock and stress. As the earth moves on from winter and blooms under the sun, we recover too, I guess, and keep going. It is a gift to your friends to die in the spring, when the world as it opens is unbearably beautiful, and as the pandemic at last wanes and we begin to sense some kind of normal life may soon start again.