As I settle into my seat on the train this morning the bats flapping around in my belfry are working up a good head of steam. I wonder why the guy sitting in front of me always drinks a beer out of a paper bag on the train at 6:45 in the morning, or why I woke up with the theme from “Gilligan’s Island” in my head. I wonder if the new top I’m wearing today looks like I only paid $2.99 for it. I feel a little chill in the air and I think about last winter and what this winter might be like, my thoughts finally settling on, of all places, the week of my dad’s funeral. A huge snowstorm was predicted that week, and because we were going to be sitting shiva, the whole family brought enough baggage for several days, prepared to stay. My mom, my brother and sister-in-law and my nieces, my sister, my husband and I were all there, and the day after the funeral the snow came and we were stuck. My mom had slipped on a patch of ice a couple of weeks before, fracturing her pelvis and was still hobbling around with a walker. There was a lot of #%^* going on. But curiously, this long weekend remains both one of the saddest and one of the nicest memories. It is so rare that we don’t have one foot out the door; we have things to do, places to go. We want to visit longer, but we have to be somewhere, we want to miss the traffic, we have to get up early. For a few days as we made funeral arrangements, buried a husband, father, grandfather, we were together. We ate, we schmoozed, we spent time with family and friends who braved the weather, we ate again. We shoveled snow, we ate some more. We cried, we laughed, we told stories, we ate. I loved that weekend. That sounds bad, right? How is it possible that I sometimes wish we could go back to that long weekend full of sorrow. But not just sorrow. Love and memories and food and laughter. We laughed a lot, sometimes with tears in our eyes. All together. With the heaviest of hearts often comes the lightest peace, and we carry our losses on our backs, like wings.

Luna, the Prototype carynjune