Fairy Lights

My friend and sister spirit Jax, who introduced me to my husband back when she was dating his cousin, is right now on her way to New York to spend the weekend with us. She and my husband grew up together in Antigua and when my own parents moved to Antigua back in the eighties, my mother couldn't wait to introduce me to her, the daughter of friends. My mother was so sure that the two of us would get on famously. And we did. And we do. I can't wait to see her. I'm thinking tonight my husband and I will take her to dinner at that Mexican place with the fairy lights and we'll sip mango margaritas and the freshest, sweetest pico in the city, and just-made guacamole, and we'll laugh and bask in the supreme comfort of such company.

My daughter is away for the weekend, visiting a friend upstate, and when she comes back, she and my son and I will head to Jamaica to spend the week with my mom and the rest of our family there. I hate to leave my husband by himself so soon after his father's passing, but he will be busy with some very important meetings so hopefully the week will go by quickly for him. He says, "Now I am an orphan" with a kind of bewilderment that such a thing could be true. He is stoic and pragmatic, this man, but even those walls of character cannot contain the need to grieve. And certainly his dad was a man worth grieving. He says he is fine when he is moving and doing, but when he stops he finds he just wants to lie in bed and stare at the wall. I remember when my dad died, it was months before I began to emerge from a kind of underwater numbness. I remember distinctly the feeling of just going through the motions.

This has been an expensive summer. I'm kind of missing that every-two weeks paycheck. But I do have work through the end of the year, and I'm going to trust that more will show up by the time I'm done with these projects. Life is uncertain but good. I'm sort of skating on the surface of it right now, accepting what is, noticing what isn't, and trying not to worry about any of it. My daughter's presence helps. Yesterday we saw the movie Boyhood, which I wanted to love more than I actually did. Still, ditching my work in the mid afternoon and going to the movies with my girl felt like a delicious escape.

Someone recently suggested there are light beings among us who can lift the mood in a room just by entering it. My mind went immediately to my daughter, her eyes alight and dancing. I mentioned this to a wise man who observed that we are all light beings, but that sometimes our light is dim and sometimes it is resplendent, and sometimes it is only our own ish that prevents us from seeing the light all around us. I pray there will always be light beings all around my children, and that they will be able to see them, and their own radiance too.