GrandmaM's Blog

It is a lovely, warm summer day when your friends and neighbors and coworkers come to mourn you. I wish you could have seen it. I wish you could have lived longer, and I thank you for your bravery, and for daring to try to keep me safe.

I've been reading poetry this morning, and thinking of you. I don't think a sad poem will help you, so I give you this one as a remembrance and a prayer:

The Summer Day


Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is is you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?


Mary Oliver