A Purple Door

I have been avoiding it. Talking about the loss of two friends within a fortnight of each other compounded by the still too recent sudden death of my brother in law and another friend terminally ill. I have nibbled around the edges of it by talking to friends in the kind of code one can use with friends. I have had wine and dervish dancing which is my way of burning off the excess energy that grief brings. I have toasted absent friends with a good dram.

When I found carefully folded into an inner pocket of my camera case the poem I read at my brother in law's funeral: "Because I could not stop for Death,/He kindly stopped for me" there was no room left for equivocating or stalling.

Even so, it has been more than a week since I wrote those words above. My "Tuesday friends" chided me for my absence from my blog. And there amid the laughter and questions about bulbs and cotton thread and teasing a woman who has the rare and precious gift of a new relationship--and some shortbread and a little knitting--I was able to talk a bit more easily. As an extrovert, things aren't quite real or resolved until I have talked them into my life. As I get older the words more often stick. The warmth of my friends helped the knot ease a bit.

And that brings me to Kris's purple door. I am fond of purple, so when Kris spoke about wanting a purple door I could not understand her reluctance, but we all need to strike that impossible balance between our inner selves and the demands of the social world. We need to be different while not looking too different.

These veronica from my garden are the closest I could get to the deep rich purple of the woodland violets of Indiana woodlands that Kris's door always fondly brought back to mind. The last time I saw Kris, knowing it would be the last time I would see her, my sister and I walked with her as she described the flowers on the wooded hill behind her house. My sister, still raw with grief over the sudden loss of her husband, and I, torn between my new home and my old, distilled those precious few moments with Kris.

I am recreating a bit of that Hoosier woodland garden here. Not all of the plants can thrive here, but, like me, some flowers are adaptable and will bloom where planted.