Remembrance

Unbelievably, a year has passed since Pippy died.  

What is one to do?  The World keeps its orbit, seasons turn, and we have little choice but to turn with it, too.  Strangely, air still enters my lungs, blood still pumps around my body, and the mundanity of ordinary existence pushes us along, as unstoppable as the whole spinning World.  All I can do is mark the passing of time after time has stopped.  

So, anniversaries, significant, trivial, public and private, are marked.  I trundle on, like a midnight workman laying traffic cones from the back of a slow-moving lorry.  I drop another cone and watch it recede, my back to the future.  

A year of cones is in view and each one is distinct, for the time-being: our first Christmas without her, her birthday come and gone, our wedding day photos reviewed again, familiar, put away, but now infinitely precious.  Maybe habit will inure me, but I doubt it. And I know, for as long as my truck rolls on, there will always be new cones to drop.