Birthdays and Beginning Again

It’s July, my birthday month, and it always feels like a hot and humid affair. I’ve raised and lowered the porch umbrella so many times that I’ve lost count, as thunderstorms and lightning threaten more downpours.

As I look back on the last year, I did practice gratitude. Or so I tell myself, despite all the terrible things happening that can cut one to the heart. The July 4th of innocent children washed away in the horror of the night into the raging Guadalupe River in Texas haunts me. I imagine the water rushing into the mouth of the sleeping, the small head striking a moving log. Climate change is real, but so is the fact that life can end, for the young and innocent, in one horrifying moment.

On this birthday, I see the wind rustling dry sycamore leaves along the sidewalks outside the Dachau concentration camp, which I visited with my sons in September. How does one move from this devastation of the human spirit and life? But somehow we do. We travel to the center of Munich, order an ice-cold beer, take deep draughts, and watch the glockenspiel ring in the 6 o’clock hour as we celebrate their birthdays.

Remembering February, the snow dusts the brown azaleas under my living room windows. The bitterly cold days seem endless. The stories from women in my writing group slowly filter in, the warmth of different voices, different stories of love and loss. The writing, always the writing, winding its way into my life, my compass of contemplation and reflection. My hope to gather in the moment through the written word before it’s gone.

The spring came, and the rain softened to mist as evenings grew longer. I boarded a plane to Istanbul. The city was filled with the romance of Constantinople, and its impossibly old cathedrals and mosques. Even under driving rain, so much that I could wring out my socks, soaked through from flimsy cloth sneakers, the place was a marvel. And then onto Ephesus, sparkling in sunlight under perfect blue skies, the ancient Roman seaport where the apostles took Mary after the Crucifixion. Peach-colored roses in bloom.

All of this in one year, fighting off the fears of old age and the pointlessness of it all. Alone in the house, the hours dragging on, reading Intermezzo—and then—remembering Ephesus.

John—remembering him. The chemo treatments, the visits to the ER, the surgeries, the long, drawn-out years at the end. That last grueling birthday together. How could this happen to a good man, a man in his prime?  Like that raging river, beyond our control.

And so, on this birthday, I chose a pot of white petunias, colors made even brighter after my cataract surgery just four days prior. How vivid and clear are the colors! Was this how the world looked when I was a child? For so long, I’d viewed life through glasses, with murky yellow lenses that were my own, tired eyes. I thought those colors represented reality, yet here was this spectacle revealing the vivid vibrancy of life. What a surprise.

Another birthday and beginning again.