Lost and Found

It has been a strange week of lost and found.  Last week we heard the news that an elderly aunt had passed away.  Aunty Jenny was only one month from her 100th birthday.  Then on Tuesday I received an email from a cousin telling me of the passing of another cousin, Henry.  It seems sort of expected and not quite so bad when the person is of a previous generation but when it happens to someone in your own generation, even when in their late 70s it feels a bit close for comfort.  Death does not concern me as such but is something you don't really think about until a moment like this and you are suddenly reminded of your own mortality.

Henry was one of my husband's many cousins who with his English wife came back to live in England around the time that we did in the 1970s.  He and his wife used to visit us often especially in the last years before my husband died and were a real source of comfort and support.  So many memories came rushing back to mind.

But on a brighter note, on Saturday we met up again with the cousin and aunty we re-discovered earlier this year after so many years.  Aunty Betty is now our only living aunt.  On Friday, my elder son arrived for a long weekend visit.  My sister and son who also live in Yeovil also came for lunch, so it was a day of meeting and re-encounter.  Strangely my cousin’s wife didn’t come as she was meeting up with a cousin of her own who emigrated to New Zealand in 1974 and was over to the UK on a visit.   She was having her own re-encounter.  It was quite a day full of chatter trying to close the gap and catch up on the intervening years.  It was a day we plan to repeat in the not-too-distant future.

Yesterday I continued to enjoy the company of both my sons.  We had a trip out to the small town where my husband and I spent the first 6 months of our marriage before sailing off to Argentina for the next 10 years.  We drove up the street where we used to live – another re-encounter with some distant memories.  We continued a couple of miles down to the coast and as it turned out to be rather cloudy at first, my son got out an umbrella he kept in the boot of the car – just in case.  On our walk around the bay we stopped for coffee and were going back towards the car when I realised that I no longer had the umbrella.  We retraced our steps to the places we had been but to no avail – lost!

In the evening we went into town for a meal and found a Mexican restaurant we had never visited before.  The tasty meal was a lovely end to a rather mixed lost and found week.