Old Memories and Eclipse

 Grief is love with nowhere to go - random facebook message

It's getting late and I'm getting up early so I should go to bed - but there's a lunar eclipse tonight and the night is beautiful and mysterious and a little cool and the nightbirds are calling.  The totality is not for another hour and I felt like writing.

This picture popped up in my FaceBook memories.  Three years ago.  We had spent some time dragging yard detritus (some of it likely *still* cleaning up from Hurricane Michael) to the burn pile.   We were taking a break, sitting on the bench.  He looked down at his arm and laughed - there was an impossibly tiny, perfect, preying mantis on his arm.  I don't know how he even saw it; it couldn't have been even a half inch long.  But when I leaned in with the camera it reared back, arms up, ready to attack.

After the photoshoot he carefully convinced it to crawl onto a bush.  I don't remember any more details of that day.  Very likely we roasted some hot dogs on the fire because that was our usual reward for doing yard work.  And when we were through with that and just letting the fire burn down, we likely got our books and read for awhile.

We had no idea that he only had ten months left to live.  It was three years and a lifetime ago.  The bench that he was sitting on is the one that I repaired recently and finally repainted today.

Must go check on the eclipse.

Getting closer to totality.  It seems part of my fae existence - to be wandering outside in the middle of the night, getting away from the house security light and finding a gap in the trees to see the shining, diminishing full moon.

Another fae moment yesterday.  I was taking a break from yard work, sitting on the front deck.  A raccoon came over, hoping for snack.  "Go away," I said.  "I do not feed raccoons."   In general, this is true.  But this time of year, they are often foraging during the day because there are little mouths to feed somewhere.  In the late afternoon I like to give my lone remaining peacock a snack before he goes to roost at night.  The only way to do this is to put out some food for the raccoon as well, because otherwise she'll go and take it from the peacock.  So she simply flopped down a few feet away from me to take a nap while she waited for me to give in.  

I got my workout last night and today.  We have a couple of bookshelves in the living room, his and mine.  Mine has books in it; his has books in it, on it, on top of it, and wedged between the bookshelf and the breakfront next to it.  I'll deal with those later.  But they also have cabinets beneath them.  I opened his, and it was stuffed with paper boxes filled with old catalogs and magazines - over 100 pounds worth.  They went to the dump today.

I don't know how much of him to erase.  He kept so much stuff.  I either tossed (ragged) or donated (in good shape) some 150 T shirts in 2020.  I kept a couple of them to cuddle.  I wrote about giving up The Honda.  A day or two after that I finally took his name off of our internet account (it was getting complicated - they've initiated two-step verification but couldn't use my phone number or email because they belonged to the secondary user - which was me - and not the primary - Bob.  The account is now just mine.

Some day I'll do the same with our bank accounts.  That probably should have been done already, but it  was one of those things that fell victim to the pandemic because it requires a face-to-face meeting with a representative - indoors - so could be put on the "do it later" list.

And now back to the eclipse.  Silly to stay up for it - it's almost midnight, and I'm getting up at 6:30 tomorrow to go to the museum.  And I still need to shower and scrub.  It's the time of year that every time I so much as step outside I'll spend the rest of the day picking mites and ticks of various sizes off of myself.  It will likely be 1 before I get to sleep.

That's OK. It's worth it.  I love lunar eclipses.  I remember one memorable one when I worked a swing shift and came home a little after midnight, stopping on my way into our apartment to see the blood-red moon hanging there, looking so close.  Likely in 1974.  A lifetime ago.  The moon, at least, is constant.