Day Sixty-Three: Remembering

Usually I only do photos on Sundays, but I only took one photo all day.
Taiya and William building a fort out of sticks and decorating with flowers. 

Today would have been my friend Brad's 38th birthday. I have mentioned him before in this blog - he is the friend who died at age 18 in a skiing accident. I call him my friend because that's what we were when he died, but a couple years before, when we were 16, we spent a summer madly in love. It inevitably ended due to our not living near each other, and due to the fact that teenage relationships usually do end, but we kept in touch and remained friends. I'm 37 now, so this all happened about 20 years ago now. The memories and the pain have faded, but they are still there. Our love was my first introduction to the whole being-in-love thing. His death was my first experience with grief. Those are both pretty powerful moments in a person's life, and so on the anniversary of his death and of his birth, I always find myself thinking about him. Brad was a fun-loving, easy-going kind of guy and I know for certain he would have no patience for wallowing, so I try to honor this and do something straight-up fun on these days. 

The kids and I built their stick fort, then went on a flower-picking expedition. We have an invasive shrub around here - privet - and it is in bloom, so we picked armfuls of the branches, which smelled reminiscent of lilacs. We picked tickseed, which we have renamed sunshine flower since it's a much more fitting name, and sweet William, and spiderwort (renamed cloud flower), and tucked them all in the cedar, hickory and oak branches of the fort. I was humming a little tune as I worked, and soon the kids were each humming their own tunes as we all tucked flowers into branches in the sun, with Daisy playing around our feet. It felt like the whole day was humming around us.

When we finished the fort, we had lunch, then enjoyed bowls of ice cream. As we sat quietly savoring our ice creams, I tried to hold off the painful wish I always have on Brad's birthday: that he had lived long enough to know this kind of moment - to be 38 and eating ice cream on a sunny Sunday with the kids I imagine he might have had. As I sat in that moment I tried instead to just soak up every single piece of it - the sunlight on the leaves waving in the wind, the light on Taiya's long red hair, William's ice cream-covered face, the cold sweetness of each bite. It is a delicious life and I am so, so grateful to be living it.