How to do life

Sometimes there is a sky so perfectly blue that I just want to wrap up in it, or drink it.

Sometimes the light hits the mountains in such a way that the trees glow, and I think about dreams and fairies and poetry and when my children were little and how sometimes I want to lose myself in those mountains.

Sometimes I walk the graveyard of an old church and think about all those broken hearts and those long lives and the really short ones, and I wish my mother would stop talking about where their burial plots are, and at the same time I'm glad she doesn't mind talking about it.

Because these two.

 

These two are my link to everything, my past and my future and my now. And every single time I make room for a day like this, I am simultaneously filled with joy and filled with dread, because this could be the last day like this with them. 

And how will that ever work? How will I navigate a world without being able to reach out and hold my mother's sweet, crooked hand and smooth down her beautifully soft hair? And how will I ever, ever, ever go the rest of my life without my father's gentle smile and his freckled knees?

I can't help but think of these things, even on a day like this—or maybe I think of things like this precisely because of a day like this, when my mother sighs a deep, deep sigh of joy and says, "I will always remember this perfect day, even if I don't have long to remember it."

Linked up with Wordless Wednesday and Outdoor Wednesday