Between Mother’s Day and upcoming weekends full of June brides, there will be a grand exodus of high school and college graduates in ceremonies all over the country. I am inundated with graduations this year translating into the potential of being financially destitute by the end of June.
There are eight snack paks of sugar free pudding sitting on the top shelf in my refrigerator. They have been there at least a year and a half. I could begin to measure my life by the amount of time that passes and no one touches those orphaned treats. I bought them for my diabetic mother when she was living with us, and this coming July, it will be two years since she moved into her own home. The pudding paks still live in my refrigerator.
At first, I mistook him for a white box, a discarded traffic hazard in the middle of the left hand lane on Highway 21, something that had fallen off of the back of a pickup truck. The car traveling toward me swerved to miss him and crossed the double yellow line into my lane about 100 feet in front of me. It was the day after Christmas, about 7:30 p.m. Mac and I were returning from dinner with my mom, my sister and her family at Johnson Creek Tavern.
Rain drenched the South Carolina lowcountry the day before I turned fifty. Maybe the sky cried the tears that would have otherwise melted my heart if I had let them trickle from my eyes, saddened by the passage of time yet grateful for my state in life.
A few weeks ago, 60 Minutes aired a segment on the plight of honey bees. Rarely do things bother me on television or in movies but the journalistic content of this story stayed with me, disturbing my psyche and my sleep. Recently, the fact that honeybees are not returning to their hives has been brought to my attention over and over again and I am unsettled by this coincidental chain of events and the subliminal message.