Absence

 Dear Readers,

It's been almost a year since I last wrote a post here.  I've missed you, but also I have missed myself...at least in black and white.  Still, I didn't write. Not only in this blog, but, excepting a few days traveling, at all.

Impossible  now as it is to recall so  much of the past for you...travels, art, the concerts of ordinary life...it's only tonight that I have come to open this page and write.  A lot has happened since just this year began.  I'm a new decade for one. Then, month by month, spring travels...to Morocco (a birthday present to myself), a skip over to see a friend in London, then my yearly visit to San Antonio, and soon a week in Sedona with my sisters.  All or any of that could have been what brought my fingers to this page.  But…

What inspires me to open here is quite different.  Two days ago, my cousin Lorraine passed away.  Yesterday, her brother wrote to let us know.  The really sad thing about loss is that there are nearly always ironies that cut deeper into sorrow.  As I read his message, I immediately thought:  but it's her birthday tomorrow, and her card is sitting in the mailbox, waiting to be picked up and sent across the miles; it would be a few days late.  Now I'd have to remove it quick before the post came. 

Yet, you know, I'd had an inkling, wondering, even as I made and wrote the card, at how it would find her.

Lorraine Ioppolo, “what I’ll miss when I move…”

 

Over long years, she'd tried hard against her cancer, coming and going, trying one therapy after another, hearing one prognosis after another...bearing the ups and downs, even moving last year clear across the country to be closer to the other of her sons and his family. 

She'd closed up a long full life in her Pennsylvania house and garden, with her photographs of the beauties of life in the country, to a very different place (though with its more delicate beauties) and smaller life.  Quite a lot of changes for her to take in, which, in the now-and-then letters we exchanged, she seemed to write of with hope, or at least acceptance.

So it's absence that brings me to this page.  Hers first, and now mine, for she has opened the long silence that echoes with the unsaid.  

I wish I had Lorraine's talent for seeing beauty, and making it:   growing  gardens of vegetables and flowers, catching in her perfect photographs the sunsets, birds,

Lorraine Ioppolo, bird at the feeder

landscapes in early mist that surrounded her. 

Lorraine Ioppolo, Sunrises

From her photos shared, you could see in her home the warm colors and carefully cared-for curiosities that looked so richly homely...hemisch, one calls it.  The way she celebrated her children's visits, happy among grandchildren, proud of them, her family connections and her outings with friends. 

“My generous sons take me to Italy”

 

 I wish, moreso, that I had known her close-up, and for longer than the past few years I caught up with her.  (I think we "met" on this blog).  We'd grown up in different family spheres, and she was much younger.

Unknowing of any of this, only last week, my friend Bonnie and I sat in the quiet old rotunda of the McNay, where we have sat before on such visits, to exchange lives. The Seasons' petals shifting before us on the wall, she said to me, almost sternly:  you need to write.  write.  Even the book I've been reading, Hisham Matar's My Friends, admonishes how "dangerous" it is not to write.  I wouldn't use that word, dangerous, but I know what he means. A life-sift [I meant to write shift, but I see this is right], an absence.

With thanks for our short time together and love to Lorraine, so I begin again.

R