A busy Mother's Day

There is (oddly) no heaviness around our house today, the first Mother's Day without Peggy...for me or for Zoë. We miss her, but no more so than yesterday or the day before. Mother's Day dinner was Mikuni take-out sushi on the lower patio, trees swaying softly in the early evening delta breeze...  followed by a belching contest, which the neighbors may or may not have appreciated.

Busy day. Michael Irwin brought his manly tools this morning and we finished nuking the deck. We took a break halfway through, pulled up a couple of chairs and talked for a long time about grieving, and loss, and moving on.  He helped me with a lot more than sawing through heavy timber.

The orange areas are the concrete piers, which I will happily pay some guy to jackhammer into little pieces for me. Like cleaning leaves from gutters, there are some things just not worth doing yourself.
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Peg would have loved to hear what I heard from the living room a few minutes ago. Zoë singing something silly, then talking to herself while studying for tomorrow's A.P. Physics exam.
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Tomorrow I pick up Peggy's ashes and bring them home.  Even though I know it's not who she was,  I turned into an emotional wreck yesterday when my friend Joyce called to check in.  I hadn't realized how deeply it had affected me until I mentioned it to her.  So glad she's going with me--our friend Norma offered on Friday and I had declined. "No, I'll be all right," I said.

I won't be "all right." But I'll be okay.  This is just one of many dips to come on the grieving rollercoaster.