It rained all the way home. Almost.
As I veered off the interstate to get on the northwest-bound lanes that led to my hometown, the sun opened its eyes for the first time all day. The next few miles were a mixture of those sprinkles that fall even though the sky is clearing--intermittent windshield wiper time.
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A few years ago, I wrote about Janie in another blog entitled "Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Days." On the first anniversary of her husband Mark's passing, the words flowed easily telling how this young widow had faced her grief head on during those initial agonizing twelve months without him. Tonight, the words are bottlenecked.
I am grieving Day One of Janie's passing.
Like the flowers that Janie loved so well (and could name on sight), friendships have their varieties. Mine and Janie's were perennials. We might talk often or we might go weeks without a conversation. We'd text late at night or early in the morning if either of us saw or heard or listened to something that reminded us of Mark--for me, that was usually some sports-related item. For Janie, it was nature's beauty. She had so many wonderful hour to hour and day to day friends, but what we shared worked for us--two women bonded by broken hearts. After my divorce, it was Janie who advised me to grieve because the end of a marriage really was a death. I would be that voice for her 15 years later when she accompanied Mark through his cancer.
Janie's mother will now bury her second child--Janie lost a brother in recent years. Janie and Mark's children will now face adulthood without their parental bedrocks.
Last summer in Ruidoso, Janie and I went in to a children's boutique to buy a baby gift for some friends. It was, of course, the perfect setting for us to hope that one day soon we would be grandmothers together--and as it turned out, that is exactly what is scheduled to happen this summer. My Lillie Jane is due just three weeks before her Sophia Jane.
It was supposed to be. I am a bit angry and a whole lot sad that it won't.
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My anger washed away this evening when the sun chose to shine just as I got closer to home. The sadness, like those intermittent showers, will come and go.
In what turned out to be Janie's final spring season on earth, how fitting it was that the rains were plentiful and the flowers were growing and more beautiful than they have been in five years. The drought is over, though a new one is forming in our hearts.
The one who tended so many gardens is gone.
