My niece Emily has been in the ICU: she caught the flu, got worse, started barfing and her (tween? Tell me he’s not a teenager yet?) son called my sister and said, Grammy, Mom needs you.
My sister went over and called an ambulance.
Emily’s kidneys had shut down and things were very very bad.
This afternoon she was moved out of the ICU, where she’s been the past week.
Today she ate solid food for the first time. Some.
She feels–well, she’s definitely had more fun than this.
Everything. Everything. Is looking far better than it did. We can start to breathe again.
Today Mom and Dad told us Dad’s in hospice care now. Dad’s favorite caretaker can still come and that made the decision easy.
This is another of the amaryllises from Dad last fall where the TSA thought the bulb was a bomb.
This is not how I usually photograph them and I wondered why I was doing it this way as I snapped another from the same angle rather than changing it. Why… And then I got out of the sun and put it back on the porch and that was that.
I did not see till I went to post the picture: it was taken looking straight down so that the stem that supports the blossoms is out of direct sight–but you can infer where it held the sunlight within itself by how it left only its shadow to our eyes. But it is real, it is there, it is strong against the winds outside, and there where it cannot directly be seen, it holds the glorious colorwork steady.
