Brunch, Upcoming Trip, Flashbacks

 Went out for brunch with Adrianne yesterday.  Always enjoyable - she's a lively conversationalist and I miss that.  Also, we tend to confuse people because after we eat, we both grab our little mini battery operated spinning wheels and sit and sip coffee and spin and chat and it is delightful.  Although we do sometimes get the attention of passers by (we always eat at outdoor tables).  People always think that spinning is a dying art - and there we are with our little high-tech modern wheels.

Trying to enjoy this while we can - spring has sprung here in the south, which means it's up in the 80s (while my friends and family up north are shovelling snow), but still dry and the azaleas are blooming.  Far too soon it will be 90s, humid, buggy, and rainy.  Gather ye rosebuds . . .

And hard to believe that my trip "sometime in March" is now suddenly "next week."  This is the Road Scholar trip to Fernandino Beach and St. Augustine that I'm taking with my cousin Marty.  I'm having my usual second thoughts as I do about any trip.  I want to go - but I hate leaving.  I have become so much of a homebody, and I'm paranoid about what will happen to the cats and my other animals if something happens to me.  But on the other hand, I can't huddle at home forever, can I? (To which an inner voice whispers "why not??")  But I know I'll enjoy it, and having time to hang out with Marty, and it's only for a few days.  At least I'm not having a full-blown panic attack like I did before my trip to Boston.

And like my lunch with Adrianne - it will be a good distraction, which I really need.  I'm in the final stretch of my anniversary of losing Bob.  I try not to brood - but it's hard not to remember.  It was on the 27th that he was readmitted into the hospital (we had been living in a hotel, which was a terror on it's own, trying to take care of him by myself).  It was supposed to be on the 28th but they decided that it wasn't safe for him - he needed to be back on monitors.

I wrote about it last year.  https://returntotheswamp.blogspot.com/2022/02/please-just-one-more-night.html   Just trying not to cry, begging for one more night together.   He started a fresh round of chemo on the 28th and things just went downhill fast from there.

There's a song that pops up on my Google Play from time to time: The Green Fields of France.  It's from the perspective of a man taking a rest in a graveyard from World War I, and wondering about the young man whose name is on the gravestone.  It has the lines:
I hope you died well, and I hope you died clean.

Or young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

And that describes Bob's last month.  It was slow and obscene.  That gentle man deserved better.

So now I will do my best to stay busy, stay distracted, actually try to enjoy myself (which I will).  But this will be playing in the background.

Gonna be a long month.