Yesterday, I collected my son from an after-school birthday party at the beach; I arrived to see nine stripped-off 5 year olds jumping in the sand, chasing bubbles. This made me have a surge of pure gratefulness (is that even a word?!), for where we live, near the sea, for him, for happy times.
Yesterday I belatedly read the heart-wrenching piece in The Sunday Times by the actress Natascha Mcelhone, whose husband tragically and suddenly died when she was pregnant with their third child. I howled as I read it. She writes beautifully, but the rawness of her grief...to me, it's unreal. It made me grateful that my husband came home last night.
A friend of a friend, I heard, has breast cancer...she had her operation last week; the loss of so many things, be it anatomy, femaleness, to the life she once knew. Makes me grateful for health, beyond belief, but also so, so sympathetic.
The thing is, getting this down in a blog is tantamount to gushing about one's life in a way that surely makes others recoil. Life is a strange thing. It's the simple things that make life relevant to others. That spark of recognition to think 'yes I know.' The simple things that count. The simple things that kids remember.
So it's the simple things I will think of today...
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