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This was the blog for yesterday, but when we discovered that the podcast hadn’t uploaded properly, we decided to fix that and let you guys enjoy it, before I shared with you how I was feeling early on Mother’s Day.

If what you want is a happy Mother’s Day message, then skip this post.

Everyone skipped? Okay, here goes.

I started noticing that I was getting depressed. No reason for it. I mean everything is going swimmingly. In fact, everything is wonderful. So why was I down in the dumps? I finally made the connection at the end of April. April 29th is, or was, my grandmother’s birthday. Anniversary depression, who me? Maybe.

I saw the perfect gift for her in the bookstore. I actually reached out for it, held it in my hand with that well of satisfaction, that flush of pleasure at how perfect it was for her, then there was that drop of the heart. All of you who have lost someone important to you, know the drop I mean. You forget for an instant, you react to something as if . . . as if . . . Then reality hits, and it’s like your heart just fell out of an airplane without a parachute and ends crashing into your feet. (What was the perfect gift? A book of odd, or famous obituaries. My Grandmother kept two Whitman Sampler chocolate boxes, gifts from other grand kids in the past, full of obits. Some of people she knew, or we knew, but mostly strangers. She’d cut out obits that were particularly pitiful or horrible and keep them. She liked to read them to me when I visited.) So the book would have pleased her, and she could have spent hours pouring over the sad contents and enjoying herself. But, she’s past needing birthday presents.

Now it’s mother’s day, and I realized that three years ago, her funeral was on Mother’s Day. One of my uncle’s, joked that Granny finally got her wish. I asked, what was that? To get us all together to visit her on Mother’s Day. There were about eighty plus of us from all over the country, there to pay our final respects.

I have the cards and presents from Jon and Trinity. We’re all going to see a movie later today with our friend Richard. We went out yesterday plant shopping with our friends Kari and Pili, and though we got wet and cold from the rain, it was a good day. I had to go back out this morning and make sure that the wind hadn’t done too much damage to the pots waiting to go in the ground. Pili came up with a garden design, and I just picked anything that caught our fancy. I stopped worrying about whether it’s supposed to grow here, or not. I just picked what I liked and we’ll plant it, and see what happens. I’ve spent eight years planting my front yard carefully, and it looks like crap, bare and too formal for me. I want the front to look like the pond area, lush, and a riot of color and shape.

I bought any plant that pleased my eye, or Pili’s. Jon and Kari totted and fetched. Trinity wandered around finding this plant or that, or just helping the basket lady plant new mother’s day baskets. She has an eye for putting things together that I would never have thought could match, but they do. It was a good day, other than the rain, and even that got us a huge rainbow in the sky above the second garden center, the one where we got the most roses. It was a round, fat rainbow, with several layers of violet in it. A good day.

It’s a mother’s day when I have no mother’s left. I’ve lost two in my life time, that seems plenty. I guess Jon’s Mom will just have to live to about two hundred or so to make me happy.