The world takes as much care with the fragile as your average moving company. Sometimes tragedies pile upon tragedies, new stresses upon already jangling nerves, losses and betrayals you never saw coming hit you from behind. My trip to San Francisco combined the professional and the personal: a conference, a memorial, and the final cleaning out of my mother's things in storage four years after her death, all while reeling from a catastrophe at work and trying to evaluate and mitigate the damage long-distance.
Old friends gave me hospitality, conversation, and assistance with the storage cleanup, along with way too much food and alcohol, and together we held a memorial for Laurie that she would have approved of. I left San Francisco feeling like a very different person from the one who'd arrived there, and I am deeply grateful.
This is Bella, a shepherd barely past puppyhood, who insisted on sharing my bed every night, and licked my face thoroughly to wake me up every morning. Dogs live so completely in the moment, enjoying every tossed tennis ball as though it were the first, and refusing to agree that it might have to be the last, that it's difficult to hang on to griefs in their presence.
And after a while, I didn't. Which made it easier to clean out the storage space as well. There was surprisingly little I wanted to hang on to, and nothing I really needed.
1 comment:
Great picture of Bella, who is still pining for your return, and great to see you last week.
Post a Comment