Fifteen years is a long time. I can tick off who has grown, where and how we’ve lived, who has come into my life and who has left, what I have learned and some of what I have forgotten, what new toys I have acquired and what I have let go of. It feels like a lifetime of change and it feels like a moment.

Fifteen years ago today, around lunchtime, David died. I still miss him. I can almost imagine sitting down and having a conversation with him. I have so much news and so many questions. At the same time, however, I cannot imagine it at all. He is too far in time and space and changes away.

Time seems to have wiped away, wiped clean, the most painful missings, the heart-wrenching grieving, leaving in its wake a sweetness, a place from which strength could be built. I know the pilings on which this life I now live rests.

And so on this David’s 15^th Death Day, we picked cherries at an orchard with Cheshire, Justin, the boys, and cousin Olivia. We shared a flight of hard ciders and some nachos in a pizza box. Julia tasted and enjoyed hard cider—first time for any alcoholic beverage—and she said she was tipsy. Then we went to Cheshire and Justin’s house with some take-out Indian food—we eat Indian food on most of David’s Death Days— and Ed joined us for supper in Justin’s beautiful garden. Wilbur played with the new-to-him horsie.

And although I don’t usually post pictures of Death Day shenanigans, I’ll do it today because we all have been so beautiful today.