Ten Years
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WizenedEye.com photo
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Ten years: forever in a child’s mind, a fraction of an augenblick in Time's continuum. Sometimes these past ten years feel like both extremes.

My mother died ten years ago today.

She was an amazing woman, the best mother any child could have been blessed with, and trying to encapsulate all that was remarkable about her in this post is more than I am capable of, so I refer you to the Heavens on the evening of Sunday, March 23, 1997...
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Each night after helping my mother into bed, I would kiss her forehead, smile and say goodnight, then slip into my parka and step out into the cold night. Sometimes I would cry. Other times I would just take in a slow deep breath of the clear winter air, exhaling the sigh of a weary daughter.

The comet had been gracing the evening sky for weeks. Our canopy is dark and star-lit on a cloudless night, and as I'd walk through the snow on the quiet road home, Hale-Bopp would come into view above the outline of the trees to the northwest.

On that night in March when I kissed her cooling forehead and made my final walk home, there was something else happening in the heavens, something not as rare as the spectacular comet, but extraordinary in combination with it: to the south, juxtaposed with Hale-Bopp, the full moon was in total eclipse, the sky bearing witness in a double tribute to the amazing woman whose soul was leaving this earth. She deserved no less.
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In memory of Evelyn Grace Andrus, 12/9/12 - 3/23/97
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