On Friday evening, Lily and I drove down to Kansas City. We stopped in Lee’s Summitt to have a birthday dinner with Michelle, who had a birthday last week. It was so nice to spend time with her and to love on Moose and Jenna. When Joe died, we hadn’t really realized what a big tribe he had. We not only miss Joe…but we sure do miss Michelle, their dogs, and Joe’s friends. It is a giant hole in our lives. As much as I would like to cling to them and clutch them close to my heart, they all have lives they need to get on with. It seems that time stopped for me, but the world around me keeps spinning. I have tried to step back and let everyone go on with their lives, but it has been a very painful process for me…letting go of all the people and pets who made up Joe’s existence. Perhaps that is why this move is doubly hard…as we are moving to a place that has no Joe memories in it. He will just have to live on in my heart and mind from now on. Anyhow, it was a joy getting to talk with Michelle over dinner. We had the best brisket sandwich I have ever had. Lily and I are still talking about it. So here is a shout out to SMOKED – a bar and grill in downtown Lee’s Summitt. The briskwich sandwich is the bomb. Lily also got asked if she needed a kids’ menu again. I always love the reaction I get from the host/hostess when I tell them she is 18.

The next day was spent touring Kansas City Art Institute. We got to hear from the president of the school, all the heads of financial aid, and all the heads of the minor programs at KCAI. One thing that really struck me when listening to the president of KCAI speak (she is amazing by the way), Ruki Neuhold-Ravikumar, is that she applauded the future students for being courageous enough to be creative every day. Many people are creative on occasion, but at KCAI, they encourage students to live creatively every single day. There are about 630 undergraduate students there, with 75 instructors who are all actively artists as well. Another comment that hit home was from the director of student life. He mentioned if you identified yourself as being that “weird art kid” in your high school….to hold onto your hats because EVERYONE at KCAI is that weird art kid. Lily will be amongst her people, and I could feel that as the day progressed and I am so excited for her. This school has been around since 1885 (dorms were rebuilt in 2020), so they know a thing or two about teaching art. She received her schedule for this fall and the scheduling gods have smiled on her. She only has one morning class….one day a week. The dorms are suite-style and spacious. Her best friend from high school is planning on attending as well and wants to be her roommate. All is falling into place. I am so happy for her. The house will be lonely without her though!

If you are local, Lily and the other senior artists from Westside High School will be having their senior art show this week. I have shared the announcement below. We finish out the week with prom. Lily has never gone to a school dance before. I was kind of excited that she was going with her good friend and future roommate since I have mentioned she should at least go to one event like this during high school. I was thinking of prom dresses and how fantastic she would look. Nope. She and her friend are dressing up as anime characters. She’ll be wearing a suit and a blue wig. Sigh. Did I mention she will be among her people at KCAI? I still told her she has to pose for prom photos.

Please stop by and see Lily’s work and that of her classmates if you can. I know it would mean a lot to her! (and she will be dressed up and in a dress that night!) I will get pictures of that as well!

For those of you who know me well, you know that I spent 6 days a week doing some form of dancing class. Whether it be Refit, Dancefit, or Zumba, I am surrounding myself with genuinely wonderful people who love music and love to get a good workout while dancing. I have a bonus group that I have been dancing with for the last year and a half. It started out with just a group of active older adults from the YMCA who wanted to learn choreography for a song or two. It wasn’t meant to be like cardio dance classes where there are cardio moves in it, but literally a dance class for adults. Heather was the instructor (she has a lot of experience teaching dance of all kinds to all ages). I was allowed in as I don’t quite make the age requirement for active older adults at the Y. The first year, there was maybe 7 or 8 of us who performed at YMCA active older adult activities at one YMCA in the Omaha metro area. This year we generally have 15 to 20 performers and we practice at two YMCA locations and perform at them both as well. It has blossomed into a group of adult women of varying ages (we have even had a few men join off and on). We have performed Christmas songs, hip hop, country, hula, you name it. We had our last performance this past week and our last gathering before summer break on Friday afternoon. I came to that practice ready to just have fun…to thank Heather for all her choreography skills and patience with us bumbling around with moves called “the sassy cat” and “stanky leg”. Nothing gets me to giggling more than a 75 year old plus woman asking with a completely straight face exactly how to do the “stanky leg” move. It still gets me giggling. Over the last two years, I have befriended Heather and we figured out we had a lot in common. I will never forget the time she called me 18 months ago while I was traveling on the way back from visiting my parents in Houston. She wanted to know what size tutu to order for me for our first performance. I had literally lived 50 years before anyone ever asked me that question! We often stay after practice and chat for awhile, which has really been wonderful for me, as I am so often alone. When Joe died 13 months ago, these women gathered around me and loved me when I was so completely distraught. Going to these dancing rehearsals have been the highlight of my week since they started back in the fall of 2021.

This past Friday’s practice was a surprise for me! I walked in to a beautiful bouquet of flowers, beautiful shining faces, and a cake that said, “Keep Dancing!” They gave me a beautiful candle called “Joy + Laughter”, some chocolates, and best of all, a dark purple tutu with a matching sequined bow for my hair! I told them that would now be in my camera bag and I would don them when I could and post photos so they knew I was thinking of them. Then we danced and I left feeling so very blessed to have each and every one of these women in my life. I will miss this group so much, but if I am ever in Omaha, I will be crashing a rehearsal! I promise!

Our third day with Tim was spent in Oregon! This is a monumental event for Rich and me. We had FINALLY reached our 50th state! No offense to those from Oregon, but it is just not on the way to anywhere we have been! We had been sitting at 49 states for quite awhile. Now we can proudly say we have been to all 50 states. We had all sorts of pipe dreams of seeing Crate Lake and photographing this deep, deep lake with crystal clear water. Whelp, best laid plans, right? They have SO MUCH SNOW right now. No one can see the lake. We talked to a park ranger (from Des Moines, Iowa, by the way) who had been giving tours there for almost two months and she has yet to see the lake. There was 13 FEET of snow in the park. All the roads were closed…even the visitor’s center was closed (for construction). I had heard about a free snowshoing event they had for two hours with a park ranger in the meadows and forests near the crater. We decided to go for it! All those Dancefit and Group Fight fitness classes paid off because I was able to hold my own snowshoing for the first time….in powder up to by knees, and a pretty high altitude for 2 hours. We had a blast. The scenery was amazing. There were buildings that were huge that were totally under the snow. There is a photo of Rich and Tim racing in their snowshoes and spraying the park ranger who was our guide. At the end, Tim did a snow devil, which is face first into the snow. His beard acted like velcro and he was a riot coming up out of the snow. The trees…were so pretty. The ranger pointed out that we were only seeing the tops of them. The first 15 feet or so where under the snow. It was an unexpectedly really good time and I am so so glad we did it! But now we have to go back in the summer to actually see it!

The Redwoods of Northern California….oh my goodness, they are a sight to behold! We had gone last year to see the Sequoias…which are equally as beautiful, but this was special. Not many people were out and about in the park this time of year, so that was nice. It rains 300 days a year in Redwoods, and we were prepared. We did three hikes in different areas of the park. The first one was in the rain. The second one was in the mud. The third hike was in the late afternoon in Stout Grove in the northern part of the park. It was so quiet and peaceful and DRY. I put quite a few steps in on this day and it was so wonderful. We found a blue bird that was singing to us at the “Big Tree”. It is called a Stellar Jay. He was glorious. I often think that Joe is traveling with me and kind of sending me messages through birds. This stellar jay was that for me. He just kept posing for me. I didn’t bring my telephoto lens for this trip, so he let me get close. It was like Joe was telling me he was with us on this trip to this beautiful National Park. I also have a photo of a banana slug. You will know it when you see it! They had banana slug stuffed animals in the visitor’s center. As chilly as it was, I didn’t expect to see on out and about, but found one on a sign! There were a lot of ferns, a waterfall I fooled around with and made it look like falling smoke….(it’s is one of my favorite shots as it was one of my more technical photos) and a lot of shamrocks. Joe told me once he was going to get a shamrock tattoo for the time he visited Ireland. We quickly concluded that he had NEVER BEEN TO IRELAND so therefore, perhaps he shouldn’t get that tattoo. It was an ongoing joke between Michelle, Joe, and me. I had to take the photos of the shamrocks….because, again, it felt like Joe was with us and laughing. We saw some Roosevelt elk while we were out and about and even saw some sealions basking in the sun as waves crashed behind them. It was a really fun day.

A short week after we returned home from Florida, Rich and I repacked our bags for cooler weather and flew out to California to see our son, Tim. Tim works as a strength and conditioning coach at Stanford University. He was hired there 16 months ago as a temp and they have taught him so much there! He is in the process of looking for a new job somewhere in the U.S. now….hopefully moving prior to when we do in mid June. I know whomever hires him will get a very devoted, knowledgeable, and hard worker. His move is the last piece of the puzzle of our crazy lives right now. We are all anxious to see where he ends up! Either way, it will be a permanent job with BENEFITS, which is huge. He is hoping to leave California and it’s crazy prices in his rearview mirror. We spent 6 days with Tim and it was wonderful. He picked us up at the San Fransisco airport and we took Hwy 1 up the coast of California from there. Here are some of the sites we saw that day. We saw a lot of rugged coastline. One of the places we stopped, there was a whole hillside of succulent plants. It was so strange! We also found a little snake on the walking path in those succulents. ugh. I am not a snake fan, big or small! There was a carving from driftwood of a momma whale with a babywhale. On the other side of it was a bench. There was an older man sitting there (which you cannot see) but his chocolate lab totally had his eye on me and photobombed the photo (which I love). There was a barbed wire fence that someone bent to be two connecting hearts overlooking the ocean, which was also neat. We stopped at Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, but alas, no glass. It used to be that instead of shells, there was piles of smoothed sea glass on the beach. We didn’t really find any. Evidently everyone would take it with them and now there isn’t much left. There is a photo of a seagull on a cliff overlooking the waves crashing below. He seemed to enjoy the view as much as we did!

I am playing catch up on all my photos right now…but I am getting there! A rainy and dreary day yesterday helped me stay inside and stay focused to get some of my photos processed. While we were in Tampa last month with family, Lily and I snuck away for a day at Zoo Tampa. We had a really nice time. We enjoyed seeing all the green…we went on St. Patrick’s Day. It was a little warmer than we were used to but we made the most of the zoo, traversing the whole thing at least twice. I wanted to make this a special occasion for both of us, so I purchased some “behind the scenes” opportunities. We did three of them: fun with penguins, feeding/training a Greater One-Horned Rhino, and watching them train an African elephant behind the scenes.

The penguins were fun. We went behind the penguin house and was able to meet one of their little penguins. She hopped around us and we were able to pet her gently on the back. They are wet and have dense feathers and feel just like you would imagine them to feel. She was obviously very enamored with her trainer, because she followed her around like she was in love with her. Lily is a puffin lover and this was the closest thing they had to a puffin. We had to sign a waiver that we were okay with being pooped on by the penguin…..evidently they can spray their poop up to five feet away. Thankfully, we did not have any issues with this.

The next encounter was with Jamie, the female One-Horned Rhino. She stuck her head into a hole in the fence and we fed her lettuce. We had a trainer with us and she had to present herself with her mouth closed and calm before she got her treat. We also had to sign a waiver with the rhino….not that we would be willing to be gored or anything like that – that we would be okay with having rhino drool on us. When Lily was feeding Jamie, she had a rope of drool to the ground that was pretty spectacular. Lily didn’t get drooled on though. A zoo photographer took some photos of us that I will try and share at the end of the photos in this post. Jamie has a baby rhino who is a couple of years old. His name is Gronk. I love it! I asked if Rob Gronkowski knew he had a rhino named after him and the zoo employee said, “Oh yes! He has been here to visit him several times!” How cool is that? I have to say that feeding a rhino was really neat.

From there we went to the African elephants. They are near and dear to my heart. Our zoo in Omaha has 3 baby elephants and the handlers at Zoo Tampa were jealous. Their “babies” are 9 years old! We got to meet Ellie. She is 21 years old, if I remember correctly, and she was super smart. They pulled in her former trainer to come and help her demonstrate for our group. This trainer worked with Ellie and the other elephants for many years but about a year ago, had moved to a different animal encounter. The chemistry between the handler and Ellie was palpable. There was a lot of love there. The handler had a huge bucket of roughly cut up apples, which she placed in the end of Ellie’s trunk. She also had whole squashes that she gave Ellie to eat. After a particularly arduous task, she threw a whole cantaloupe into Ellie’s mouth. She just crunched it down and then for about 20 seconds or so, there was cantaloupe juice running down the back side of her trunk and onto the dirt. Did you know that elephants only have 4 molars? They are big ones though! Ellie knows a ton of tricks. Some are to help with when the vets need to draw blood, etc. They do that from the back of their ears.

We learned a lot of interesting things at Zoo Tampa. Evidently they have their own show on Disney Plus! I don’t have that channel so I had no idea. However, people were often exclaiming that they knew the trainers or the animals and their stories from the show. I will have to try and look it up and see if we can see it on another platform. What do you think is the most expensive animal to feed at Zoo Tampa is? You’ll never guess…as I was shocked to find out it is their manatees! They had 11 when we were there last month. They eat 6000 lbs of romaine lettuce a day! That is A LOT OF LETTUCE!! It costs more than the big chunks of meat for the big cats…more than the food for the elephants. You will see in the photos of the manatees that there is just a halo of lettuce on top of the water for them to eat. Zoo Tampa also has koalas, which I am not sure I ever saw in person before. We were able to catch the McCaw flyover, when the group of colorful birds are let loose to fly over the zoo and fed peanuts by their trainers. We also saw a very interesting bird called a shoebill. They look prehistoric and are oddly beautiful. Lily loved them! We happened to be there at the end of the day when they were feeding them fish. It was really cool. Anyhow, we had a really good time. I look forward to going again when we are down there.

Again, I am playing catch up with my photos. When I go someplace and take a lot of photos, I will tell you that term “a lot of photos” usually means over a thousand a day. Usually, I try to wait a few days to go through the photos, so I have a “clean eye” looking at them. I have to cull out the ones that I don’t like and then go through the process a second time when processing them through lightroom. It is an arduous process, but one that I enjoy doing. It is just time consuming. This is why I am always playing catch up. I am blessed to have the pleasure to travel to wonderful places. I try to capture some of that in photos. If there are animals involved or beautiful vistas, I am sucked in and I start clicking away, trying to capture the essence of what I see and feel and put it into a photo.

In mid-March, Rich, Lily, and I flew down to New Port Richey, Florida to spend some time with Rich’s parents and sister. Bonus visitors were there as well: Rich’s Uncle Joe (his mom’s younger brother) and his family, and a family friend from Sarasota. We had a really nice time. Rich and I decided about 2 years ago that we were going to make a concerted effort to spend more time with our parents. His mom has Alzheimer’s, and my dad has dementia. My father is in a memory facility as of the end of January. My mother-in-law is still at home, but it is not about good and bad days now as much as it is good and bad hours. Watching a parent fade away mentally is so very hard. Growing up, you depended on them to raise you to be successful adults. When Joe died, we naturally wanted to turn to our parents for consolation. That is hard to do when your parent doesn’t even understand who has died. Even in our grief, we have tried to visit our parents – to spend time with the parents who are losing their memories, and to give support in however we can for their spouses – the caregivers. Lily had a few days off of school, so we flew down from a Wednesday to a Saturday. On Thursday, the whole big crew of us went to Busch Gardens to spend the day. We didn’t really think about the timing of our trip – it was spring break for a lot of the country, and they were all headed to sunny Florida. Unlike the time when Michelle and I were there in the off season in January, this time it was packed with visitors. We were there all day and I wanted to share a few photos of the day.

I should probably warn you that the next day, Lily and I went to Zoo Tampa. However, there are a lot of animals I had not photographed before that reside there. I am still plodding along in Lightroom working on those. Then the next week, Rich and I flew to California to spend 6 days with Tim. We went to several national parks. No animal photos in there besides a few birds and sealions. However, if you are tired of the zoo animal photos, just remember that I am moving to northwestern Montana in two months or so and there aren’t any zoos up there!

When the boys were in high school a decade ago, they used to have to take the ACT on Saturdays. Now it is a part of the junior curriculum and they are given during the school day. This past Tuesday, Lily’s school gave the ACT to the Juniors and sophomores. If you were a freshman or senior, you had the day off. Lily had big plans to get her hair chopped off. I wanted to get some traditional Chinese dress photos prior to said haircut. We made a deal – that if she would do the whole photoshoot thing with me, I would then drive her straight to the hair salon to get her hair cut. Thankfully, midday on a Tuesday, there aren’t a lot of people in the Old Market passageway in Omaha. It was deserted and we were there about an hour just having fun. I had envisioned these photos for over a year, so I am glad we got them done!

Well, it has been one year today since our Joe was killed in a car accident in Colorado. My life has so drastically changed since that moment. I had no idea how much pain there was in losing a child. No idea. I didn’t realize that grief stays with you. It isn’t something to be gotten through, like a dense fog. It is now holding your hand for the rest of your life. You just have to decide from day to day…. sometimes hour to hour if it will drag you around to places you don’t want to be, or if you will walk companionably together along your life’s path. I can say there has been a fair amount of dragging with me and grief this year, but I am hoping it will be more of the latter…. walking together and experiencing life. I never know hour to hour which it will be. I also didn’t realize that “early grief” is typically defined as the first 2 years after a death of a loved one. I now realize that someone who is only three months out from a death is still in that protective fog of grief. It is when the acceptance and realization that this death is truly real, is when the true pain really starts. That fog lifts and stops protecting your mind and heart and you have to really start to feel what it is like to lose your loved one. Everyone’s grief is different. I never know what is going to activate my grief…. send my brain into a “grief burst”. It can be a song, a thought, a photo that pops up on Facebook or my echo device on my desk. Early on it was a simple as someone wearing a shirt with “94” on it to one of my cardio classes I attend. That was the year Joe was born. I would have noticed it before, but after his death, that was all I could see. I also have learned that the death of a child is particularly hard. I have learned that if you haven’t also lost a child, I can stop listening right away to your “friendly” advice. (And I have gotten plenty of friendly advice about how I should grieve).

Yesterday we had an open house at our home for those who knew Joe to come and gather and honor his memory and the fun life he lived. We had about 40 people come, and it was a beautiful day. The weather was in the low 60’s and sunny. Not bad for early March in Nebraska. We actually had to turn on the AC because it got so hot in the house. I think we had about a 50

Yesterday we had an open house at our home to bring together those who knew Joe to celebrate his life. I know his friends in Missouri get together often but we wanted to include the folks here in Nebraska as well. I think it was a 50/50 split of locals and out-of-towners. He had military friends here from his guard unit, Delta Chi brothers, and high school classmates. He even had a former employer stop by. We were blessed to have his wife, Michelle, here as well, to be surrounded by love for her as well as for Joe. I have been contacted by his OFD brotherhood, and a couple of them were headed to the crash site today along with some firefighters from Virginia (they are all in a firefighter class in Colorado together). It shows how deep the red line courses and what a brotherhood it is. The OFD firefighters are being supported by their classmates who didn’t even know Joe. It bowls me over every time…. this love these firefighters have for each other. I am so glad that Joe was blessed with that brotherhood, even if it was for such a short time. I also got a message from one of the FF/EMTs who responded to Michelle and Joe’s accident in the snow storm a year ago. He has been following my blog and felt that he and Joe were a lot alike. It was such a wonderful thing for him to reach out to me. God bless him as he continues his work as a FF/EMT.

Today Mass was celebrated in honor of Joe at our parish at St. Gerald in Ralston. We were greeted after the Mass in the narthex by several of our good church friends. They stood in a big line, and we went down the line hugging them as they gave us words of encouragement and a sunflower. We ended up with 30 sunflowers: 27 for Joe (one for each of the year he lived) and one each for Rich, Lily, and me. Sunflowers are my jam….I will travel a long ways to just take in a good sunflower field. I made it through the Mass without a lot of tears (Sunday morning Mass was different – I was a hot mess then). I looked up and saw all these beautiful people with these sunflowers and totally lost it. It was one of the most kind things. Thank you to everyone who played a part in that. It is making me tear up now just thinking about it. Thanks to everyone who came to the open house as well. I don’t know how we’ll celebrate Joe up in Montana, but it was so nice to get everyone together this year. Thanks especially to my brother-in-law, Joe, and his wife, Heather, and her son, Kevin, for coming from Virginia to be with us this weekend.

So here is to another year of beautiful memories of Joe. I have told a few people this, but wanted to mention it here. When Joe was alive, I had to wait to talk to him about things that happened to me or that I thought about. I don’t have to do that anymore. I have access to him all the time now, in my heart and mind. I have a book I write letters to him in quite often. I can talk to him out loud, which I do often because I am usually alone, but can also just think to him and know that he is hearing me. Sometimes I can hear his reply right away…or that wonderful laugh that he had. I no longer have to wait until he is off shift or not at BJJ or worry about interrupting time with Michelle. I have his attention whenever I need it. His death dropped me to my knees, literally and figuratively. I will miss him until my last breath. I want to live a life to honor his. I want him to know I eventually found my smile again and even though I was so very sad to be without him, I honored him by continuing to live mine until I see him again.

Have you ever heard of the Japanese art of kintsugi? I have seen and heard about it for a long time but just learned the name of it today. The Japanese make beautiful bowls of lacquer and pottery. But life happens. Earthquakes come or other accidents occur, and these bowls fall and shatter. The Japanese don’t discard these broken bowls though. They pick up the shards and using the art of kintsugi, they put the pieces back together. They don’t use glue to try and hide the cracks. They use gold – a precious metal – to hold the shards together. It shows the bowl has been broken and has lovingly been put back together. The bowl isn’t the same. It looks different. It may even be shaped differently, but it is a bowl again.

Grief is so much like this. My heart shattered in a million pieces almost a year ago. I remember sitting there and thinking that I could actually feel like air was blowing through my chest…. like there was a hole the size of a cannon ball where my heart should be, and the wind was just blowing right through me. I always pause now when I go to say, I wish something from my heart…. because me heart is still so very broken. However, I envision my heart going through a long kintsugi process of being repaired but still being able to see the many cracks – evidence of my heart breaking – and proof that it is healing…but will never be the same. Anyhow…this was brought up in a grief zoom I was part of today and I wanted to talk on it now that I know the name of this art. I have put a couple of photos of examples below. I lived in Japan for 2 years but I don’t have any Kintsugi art. I think it is beautiful and each piece tells a different story.