On change and the imperfect thoughts

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jewelled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.
Ada Louise Huxtable

Our summer here, in Nettle country, has been a far cry from the right kind of summer days. We have yet to witness one of those 'stripping-down-to-bathing-suit' days or a perfectly balmy night...and all of it not only because of the rotten weather. Indeed ever since, a few months ago, my brother-in-law was diagnosed with an illness necessitating a major surgery, our days and nights have been angst ridden...of course nothing comparable to what himself has been going through neither what his wife (my little sis) has had to cope with, specially in front of their lovely daughter.
Yet both of them kept up the mood and acted coolly. They even took a short vacation trip just before the surgery and had a terrific time, soothing their battered spirit in the uplifting warmth of a Greek island, believing that all that happens, happens for the best as my late uncle would say.
The surgery is over now and doctors are confident that it went well. my brother-in-law has been wheeled out of ICU, that dreadful yet life saving place.
He is recovering in his hospital room and upon his own request, we are not allowed to see him. We will wait till he feels ready and comfortable to see us again.
Despite this good part, we can't just shed down our tension, not yet, not when, in a few days it will be our beloved Boston cousin's turn to undergo heavy surgery for his back.
I guess I could say... and so on in a Kurt Vonnegut manner...
Well it is just that. Going on so...
There is this old friend, that I visit every now and then in Ghent, battling deep depression for over three years now, her old self gone, trying to no avail to grip one end of the rope that will enable her or her doctors to pull it up from that dark abyss invisible to most of us.

Last I saw her, just before my brother-in-law's surgery, my tired eyes hidden behind dark glasses, I asked her to walk from our meeting point in the Zen garden just outside the train station till Sint-Baaf cathedral and light candles. Which is exactly what we did.Though I knew how Cathedrals can overwhelmingly weigh us down, outlining our smallness and that maybe our timing was wrong. But we went on. As we stood under "The Adoration of The Mystic Lamb" its incredible beauty made me feel even more weighed down in a painful way. I reflected that the brothers van Eyck in all their greatness must, most certainly, have had to go through the changes of their own lifetime. Maybe as they finished the very masterwork that kept our heads skyward, they experienced the delusion of directing time. Their Art made it through the trials of time, from the Middle Ages into the twenty first century, imperturbable in its beauty.
Then it sunk down that we too, with all our flaws and endowed with emotional intelligence, will be able to stand up to those changes no matter their conspicuous character, no matter that can take the shape of absence, your own daughter's, who is going away to the feast of the world leaving you to face the emptiness of days with no sweet sound of music practice, no complaints over a vegetarian dinner just because absolute beauty will always be on duty.
Time spent drawing with my niece, in the afternoon light, our inside chit-chat at long last hushed by our concentration; times when my daughter arrives, late night from say a London trip, entering by the front gate while my son makes his come back from one of his nightly bike rides from the back door, in almost a synchronized motion, joining each other over a late snack on the kitchen counter, Their laughter fading in the night as fatigue takes over, or when I walk out of a cathedral with a cherished friend battling ugly depression, but able to laugh in a self mocking way while talking, over coffee and speculoos, about her own history of passing out on the most impromptus moments in life, actually finding herself lay down on a marble table in the lobby of an old Roman house... I take off my dark glasses and let my eyes get, once again, acquainted with light and the lighter side of life. So the changes come up close to the point of becoming memories.
Summer 2007 is not yet over and there is hope for balmy nights, meanwhile spending evenings with Haruki Murakami, sipping chilled white wine has its own rewards. In the opening pages of his "Norwegian Wood" he so pertinently points out that:" Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts."
Flora