It's Your Month

It's your month, and I'm missing you as I move away from crowded quarters and lack of privacy.
It's your month as I sweat and swear and try to arrange life to my liking. (How can that happen without you?)
It's your month as we prepare for Hailey's birthday and back to school and the final fall festivals.

School starts on the 17th this year, almost a week before your birthday. Remember "celebrating" your birthday with Back to school?

Oscar and Veronica have been helping me with the move -- funny how  that has worked out. They were always right up there with help when we needed it, weren't they?

I have your chair, and its kind of been all over my house already. It will probably end up in the bedroom, but that will have to wait until the bed is moved in. It isn't a very big bedroom after all. Even after being in storage over a year, it still feels like you.

I want to go back three years.
I really want all this to have never happened; to be a bad dream. (That said, I'm tired of dreaming it's a dream and then waking up to find out it isn't. I hate waking up more than usual when that happens.)
I want it to not be; but I know that this is how it is.
I just wish it wasn't this way, that's all.

I miss you more these days, whether it's because August, or because of moving, or maybe just because. All I know is there's a hole in me where you aren't.

2

Warren is 2 years old today.

Seems incredible.

And how can you have been gone for so very many months?

You were here when he came into this world.
You were here to enjoy him, to laugh at him, to teach him to laugh.
You were here to be his pappaw -- his a-a; his ya-ya -- before he was even old enough to know there was anyone beyond himself and his parents.
You were here.

And then you were not.
You didn't see him crawl or walk or run or climb.
I'm not sure you if you saw him sit up on his own.

But you saw him laugh.
You made him laugh.
You made him happy.

And you slipped away before his first birthday, and here it is his second birthday already.

It isn't right that you aren't here.
Wasn't right then; isn't right now.
It will never be right.

Wish you could see what a little man he is. You would have great fun arguing nonsense with him. He can give as good as it gets, that's for sure.

Warren is a happy healthy two years living and you are going on two years dead. And I know you would still adore him, as he would you.

Warren's Going to Be 1!

Tam wants me to make devilled eggs.
Well, to be honest, I said I would.
I will make them, too. It's a way of you celebrating with us, I suppose. That's how I am going to look at it anyway.

Tam said she really liked that chili mac stuff we had after your service. That would be Johnny Marzetti, and I hope it was Rita's that she liked so well, because it was someone from the other side of the family -- your side -- that made the other pan of it. They were basically the same; one had more cheeses, I believe.
Not that I remember a lot from that time period.
Another interesting way to make you a part of it just turned up. Rita asked Tammy if she wanted Paper plates and stuff, because she has a lot left over from -- then.
That's really strange because someone had said something about them being plain white and how Warren might someday feel slighted, because Hailey usually has Ariel plates and we have tons of pictures to prove it. Now we can tell Warren, if he's ever that petulant, that the plates were left over from the celebration of your life we had after you were finished with it, and that it was your contribution to celebrating his first year of life -- even if you could only be here for half of it.

That's an interesting way to keep you as a part of out celebrations. Even as a changing part of our changing celebrations. Because, life evolves; life goes on. Yadda yadda.