Chat

I've had the opportunity over the past week to have a couple of extended chats with my second wife, kicking around old times--those times that we so casually threw away and which seem now to have been worth infinitely more effort than we invested. I doubt whether either of us could say now just exactly what happened, how it had happened, why we let it happen. Maybe it's because we were both just strong and proud in the full vigor of our years, and we look back now with the brittle conscience of old age. We were raising our children at that time, with the usual lavishing of love and carefulness, and we forgot to raise ourselves with the same sobriety. We forgot to protect ourselves. 

I'm so happy, in any case, to see that she has landed in the care of her daughter and her husband and is able to every day enjoy her two grandchildren in the same house. It is a large, spacious house, as I was able to see on video call, resting on an extensive plot of wooded land--a little paradise, really. As with all who have grown old, she has a number of health problems, and so I am thankful for the fact that she is with a loving family, people who will watch over her, just as we did, once upon a time, for my mother, and for her mother as well. What goes around comes around. Sometimes.