Returning to the World!

Today's post is filled with Autumn Images, all taken at Michigan State University's horticultural and children's gardens.

Thanks for all of you who have sent good wishes and still visited the Marmelade Gypsy while I've been at home and sick -- not able to easily post and even less easily able to visit your blogs.

I have lots of catching up to do with my regular pals, along with the writers, the Halloween Party folk and the Pink Saturdays!

I'm back at work -- sort of. I got here about 1, after a doc appointment and a walk through MSU's gardens.

"Why the gardens when you're sick and it's raining?," you might ask -- and rightly so.

I guess, because I needed to.

All bundled up in the warm coat of many colors I bought in Canada, I walked through the drizzle with my camera, catching the last of autumn before forecasted snow comes. I hope it will pass me by and that my walk was premature. Still, no chances. I'm not taking chances.

Don't put off till tomorrow -- we all say that, don't we. And, often make those calculated risks of what can be put off until tomorrow, just assuming tomorrow is a normal day.

I thought of that when I walked into my office and saw papers I meant to take to the in-house mail before I was sick last Tuesday, sitting in the same stacks as before. (I think they put a quarantine sign around my office. Even the janitors didn't come in.)

But I've thought of it before, too. I've been thinking about it for the past almost-24 hours.

Last night Rick came over with my dinner (he has been so good to bring me dinner every night). And after I finished eating, he said, "Turn off the tv." Made sense to me -- he's not that fond of TV, and it's all the same these days.

Then he said he had something to tell me -- and told me that his cousin, the vibrant, feisty, energetic and outrageously creative thirtysomething Andrea, had died unexpectedly that weekend.

We are filled with sorrow for Andi and her family. For all of us, really, for it's a huge loss. More than I want to write about right now, for my heart is aching for them all, and for me, too. And writing about this -- no, believing this -- is so very hard.

One day, you're alive. Ready to face the world. And, even if you're not really "ready," you are darned grateful that you can.

And so, as I walked under the raining sky, it felt as though the world was crying with me. I had to see this garden, at one time so very much alive. Now, drying up, withering, ready to rest.
And I couldn't help but think of Andi, so colorful and vibrant, like the flowers I saw in the gardens several times this summer. Alive and beautiful. That color, the joy now still.

The colors of brown and rust and tan were occasionally punctuated by a colorful tree or the purple astors. But those were fewer and farther between. It was a place of quite, beautiful in its own way, but in a lost, lonely beauty. One of sorrow.

I was alone, and yet I didn't feel alone, but accompanied by all the others who have left too soon.

I know the garden will be beautiful again. But Andi -- her beauty must now be in our hearts.

Crossing the bridge.

Sometimes, it just doesn't feel like it's time to cross the bridge.