Pensive

 Today I am celebrating the birthday of one that is gone. My wife's sister Joan Marie would have been eighty today. But she was called home five years past in 2017. My last interaction with her was on the day she passed, the wife and I had brought her one of her favorites from McDonalds. As I left, I picked a cherry tomato off her plant. I ate that tomato and teased her that it needed salt. Saying goodbye, I didn't have any idea it would the last. But today I'm thinking of her and missing her wit and sarcasm. That was our relationship. A back and forth that lasted for years. I watched her children grow, watched her grandchildren grow too. And now I'm seeing her great grandchildren. Time marches on as the saying goes.

 I've found that as the years pass, I am saying, it would have been, a lot more frequently than I used to. All those people that were close to me that live only in my memory of them. There are those that I didn't know all that well, but their presence is missed, nonetheless. Old classmates, acquaintances and co-workers. It doesn't take to a birthday to be reminded of them. A place, a phrase or an old photograph often triggers those memories. Those that I can turn to and say, remember when, are also getting fewer. My world is becoming a smaller place. It is a return to my youth of sorts. Our worlds are small indeed when we are young. Life expands and then contracts. It is truly a cycle.

 I don't find any of this sad, that isn't how I would describe what I'm feeling. Pensive is the word that fits best. To sit quietly and remember and contemplate the meaning of it all. I wonder if any of that has meaning at all? It's the same sentiment that was expressed at the end of the movie, Forest Gump. You know, when the feather is floating in the air. " Forrest Gump:

I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floatin' around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it's both." Pensive. Today I'm thinking about Joan Marie, especially.