Pre-Holiday Days

The world is as lovely here as it ever gets.  The trees are full of color and there is a wonderful crispness to the air.  It is a joy to be outside.  My neighbor, Linda, and I walk together every weekday morning and take in all of this beauty.  "It's so quiet here," my grandson Seth complains.  He is used to the busy world of city life in Taiwan.  Perhaps it is my age, but I love the beauty and quiet that surround us here. 

Here is a view of part of our autumn-filled neighborhood.

October brings several family birthdays.  Seth and my sister Maryanne share the 2nd.  Layne is celebrated on the 5th.  Dorothy, and now our son-in-law Dominic share the 7th.  Several friends also fill in the early days of October with birthdays.  Gerald was here to help us celebrate Seth and Layne.  I love it when he is here!  While he was here we also enjoyed a fall concert in which both Seth and Angelica performed.  The music they learned was both beautiful and spiritual.  It is a treat to listen to.  Here's Seth, in happy birthday anticipation.  He turned 16.  He thinks that means it is time to learn to drive. 

Layne turned 78 on October 5th.  His birthday treat was a carmel sundae.

It's always a joy to have Gerald with us.  The kids presence with us brings him here quite often.

Seth and his Sonous group sang in a local chapel and it was glorious!  The acoustics there made their sound deep and rich.  Can you spot him?

I feel blessed to have family visits fairly often.  Audrey and Cliff were here last weekend.  Of course they spent time in Pocatello visiting Chase and family and their college kids, Allegra and Isaiah.  But we got a piece of them too.  We shared an order of grass fed beef with them and are now the proud owners of another freezer, to accommodate the extra meat.  I think we are pretty set for meat for the next year and beyond!

Last Saturday friends invited us to their new house to experience an Indian ceremony to dedicate their new home.  Wow was that interesting.  They hired a Hindu Priest to come and perform the ceremony.  It took well over an hour!  He blessed everything associated with that home, the owners, and even the bugs that were disrupted when the house was built.  He read from his ceremonial book and chanted in Sanskrit, with the home owners sitting nearby, partaking of various fruits, flowers, seeds, salt and so forth, from a collection of these items placed on a table before them.  The rest of us sat on the floor of the empty house and listened.  The Priest did his best to explain some of what he was doing, but I must admit that the American guests got a bit restless with the length of the ceremony. What a contrast between that ceremony and our own practice of dedicating a home with a simple prayer.  The Indian women in the group then served a delicious meal of various Indian dishes.  That was tasty.   

Here you can see the ceremonial table, filled with items the Priest inserted into various parts of the ceremony as he dedicated what felt like an endless list of home related items, including the new owners themselves, Vikram and Megan.  They sat on pillows in front of this table during the entire ceremony.

It seems to me that this time of life begins to bring losses, as more and more friends in our age group begin to die.  So far, we now have 5 widowed friends.  Our beloved neighbor, Jim Wilkie, is our latest loss.  He was diagnosed with cancer a couple of weeks ago and is already gone!  I feel the loss of him and others whom we love.  I suppose the losses will escalate with time.  I don't like that about getting older.  Well, old.  Yet somehow we will adjust and, somehow, life will go on.  I feel, more than ever, that the dead continue on, and are near us; that the veil between us and them is very thin.  Death holds little fear for me, for I know that, one way or another, life goes on and on.