Dec
09
2009
Magic
Whatever the virus of choice permeating through her school was Thanksgiving week…Sara caught it. Hitting her like a brick wall the morning after our Turkey-fest…she awoke with the flu. That night, with tissues, the barf-bucket, Vaseline and flat-gingerale with a sippy straw at her side, I tucked her in – cozy in my bed.
In her fever-induced fog, she whispered softly to me, “Mom. If there was magic in this world and we could use it, I would only ask to use it once. I would bring Grandmom back to take care of me when I was sick, because she would make me feel so much better.”
April 30, 1943 – December 7, 2005
In Blackwater Woods
are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment.
The long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away
over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond,
no matter what its name is, is nameless now.
Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime
Leads back to this:
The fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it and, when the time comes
to let it go,
to let it go.
- Mary Oliver
