The Turn of a Page

With my annual "educator" gig staring me in the face, it makes sense that I've gotten a bit reflective in these waning days of summer.  And, like seemingly every other 21st-century, first-world woman lucky enough to be able to pay her bills and put a little extra aside each month, I am tempted to be critical of the reflection that is staring back at me.

How on earth is it possible, I ask myself, to still consider my summer "a happy success" despite attending my dear friend's funeral just last week? 

Surely, there must be some sort of moral crack running through my core.

Whatever my justification is for this quiet joy that runs through me, I think the greater lie for me would be to say that this has been a bad summer.  Because it hasn't.

Even this past month--a month weighted down by the wrenching evidence of life's circular tendencies--I have come away heartened.  Consider Bev and Janese and Carol and JoAnn and Mark and Mike and Rob and Brenden and Kim and Mary and Kelly and Renee and neighbors too numerous to name. . . .  Frankly, I have spent time with too many good people in otherwise sterile hospital rooms to believe that joy and love can be snuffed out by the writing of that final chapter.

Yesterday, as we left Pioneers Park, Eric and I pulled the car over to check on a soft-shelled turtle hunched motionless in the middle of the road.  Clumps of still-red blood pooling at its side told us why he'd grown so still.    Moments before, we had celebrated the discovery of a fat, very much alive Monarch caterpillar and its red-beetle neighbor hidden underneath a milkweed leaf.

Everywhere there is evidence that life is full and messy, cyclical and miraculous.  Everywhere, there are stories of revolution and renewal.  Of lives filled up and lives spilled out again.

Perhaps the explanation to this contentment that runs through me, then, is that I have been lucky enough to have taken notice of these things, to have moved into and through these moments of joy and aching, to have lived them as fully as I could, eyes and ears and heart wide open.