Dark Thoughts.
Yom Hashoah was very present in our lives these last few days. I commemorated the deaths of my aunts, uncles, and cousins who were killed. Thinking about my cousins: Renee, 14, fair and smiling; Friedl, 15, who had been sent to France from Germany to join her cousin, looking for safety; and Carlo, six years old, a little rascal with a reputation. He makes me think about the young children of immigrants whose names we don’t even know, who were separated from their families and sent to a world of unknown threats and likely strangers. And their deaths take me to Gaza, where so many children have died or have been maimed.
The empathy I feel is wrenching. What is happening right now to those poor children and their frightened families makes me think of my own past.
Spring Thoughts.
Last week, the azaleas were blooming. They cover the slope in front of my house and they make me proud! People in the neighborhood stop and comment. They were planted by my husband, who was a devoted and patient gardener over the course of the 55 years that we were living there. He was not interested in landscaping or creating beautiful gardens. What mattered to him were individual plants that he bought, that he found in empty lots, or that were given to him. Every year, he waited for the seeds and plant catalogs to arrive in the mail so he could prepare a careful order.
The expectations and the regularity of spring blooming are soothing. But the plants are getting old and losing some of their vigor. I do my best to encourage them and preserve them. The beauty and exuberance of the spring used to lift my spirits, but now, my pleasure has been muted. The world has become too dark.
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