Forced to Remember: Another Church Shooting

For days now I have been fretting about small white daffodils with orange centers. My really big raft of them, near the house, disappeared somehow in 2006. There were one or two others, planted by family friend and greenie Bob Grimac and my daughter Lucy under our maple tree many years back, cadged by Bob from some environmental event or other. But I hadn't seen either of them bloom, though hundreds of other daffodils, yellow, cream, are spilled out everywhere in my yard. How touching, how sweet, that as I pull out of the drive this a.m. they have burst forth,  the orange-centered mavericks. Not one, not two, but dozens, as if they'd dived underground during the harsh freeze and just multiplied into relentless numbers, ambassadors of cheer, reminders of Bob.

Who I was already thinking about. Because of the shooting. The new one. The Baptists. In Illinois, in a church that looks just like the one most of the way down Middlebrook, if you're not looking at the television screen straight on. And inevitably remembering our own shooting. Bob wrote about his experience that morning at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist for Metro Pulse. I'm not sure I really took it in, if any account of that day can be absorbed. I'm going to re-read, and see.  And I think I'll take a couple of those flowers to TVUUC this evening, for the security guard to keep on his desk.