One size fits all

Thank you for the kind and heartening words, my Blipfoto friends.

Here we are in our masks, now obligatory in Tuscany. After 31 days it was time to get supplies. A strange and rather lovely experience seeing people who have been our companions in this small corner of this terrible storm.

My Mum would have loved this corner of Italy, the country in which she married my dad so long ago. When I was just a bambino we lived for a little while practically underneath the Primo Cappello, the first of the stations of the cross that lead up the Sacro Monte outside Varese.

Mum died peacefully and rather suddenly in the end, surrounded by the carers and nurses who did so much for her in her calvary. My two brothers and sister arrived shortly after she passed from here to there. With my other brother, trapped in Boston and fighting the good fight, we talked virtually all five of us, while Mum lay silent finding her wings to fly.

It was the best we could do in these tragic and terrifying times. And it was a first step on a different sort of journey.

It is of course terribly sad and the emptiness that one tries to foresee and finesse will not be gainsaid. And yet the world in its current anguish keeps turning, grinding towards an uncertain future that is so much harder on so many millions of people than us.

Grief will come and go, finding its own strange rhythm amidst the beauty of the cherry trees blossoming and the secretive Golden Oriole’s fluting song. We are lucky to be far from the frontline and it’s perils and those fighting to turn this beast around. There will be many things to do in the coming days and she will be in our hearts. But also in our hearts will be those who are hazarding so much to save lives, to bring food, to care and give succour in such arduous and frightening circumstances that have willy nilly been foisted upon them.

My mum was a great believer in the positive; that if only you could line yourself up right you could somehow see a way through. It is hard to see that path just now but she would have fought like hell to find it.