Today, after smoothies for breakfast and salads for lunch and all the good mumbo jumbo, the man and I cooked and enjoyed Quiche for dinner  … for the first time in a looooong time.  I could have made gluten-free crust (but I did not) and I like to think it’s good for me because of the abundance of spinach.  Solid.  🙂

I will say that I should have checked the weather when I did my Sunday meal planning (we are trying to plan and grocery shop for the upcoming week … which is more challenging than I thought it would be).  Had I checked to see that it was going to be stinky hot for October, I might not have chosen Quiche for tonight’s dinner (which necessitated the oven being at full force for over an hour).  But I didn’t, and we made the Quiche … and it was glorious.

Glorious, I tell you.  And I won’t take it back for anything.

On a completely unrelated tangent, six years ago today at about seven in the morning, I was driving home from the gym (I used to be uber-inspired, and work out with the dedicated folk of the six o’clock hour … God bless them) and the phone rang.  It was my mother, and she let me know that my grandmother had passed away.

My grandmother ~ as I have mentioned in this blog before ~ was no ordinary woman.  She was a corker, a force of nature … a stubborn anomaly of her generation.  She was amazing. Hearing that news, as the sun blinded me in the passenger seat of the car, and traffic edged forward in a painful stop and go motion ~ was utterly devastating.  It felt as though the air had stopped going to my lungs … I couldn’t breath, couldn’t speak.  Something had ended that I would never get back.

Today, six years later, my mother had a follow-up with her doctor.  She’d had a few tests run a week or so ago, and the whole family, whether we outwardly admitted it or not, were on pins and needles worrying about the results.  I know that no one’s heart was in quite the vice grip that my mother’s was … I know this from the sound of her voice on the phone, but also from the tension that I held for weeks waiting for my own results to come back.  It’s agonizing, torturous … a vast plain of speculation and fear.

And when my phone buzzed with a message from my father, a positive, upbeat “it’s good news” message, it felt as though the weight that had pinned the corners of life down had been released.

I can wax poetic about a  lot of things … I’m good at it.  Adjectives are my friends.  But today, words couldn’t possibly capture the relief and joy I, along with my family, felt at the good news.

My brother (himself quite familiar with adjectives and powerful language) wrote a beautiful note that equated the karmic balance of today’s significance.  Six years ago we lost a woman who shaped our lives and we will never fully heal from that.  Today, we were given the gift of my mother’s life and health.  And nothing can fully explain the power and intensity of that.  To whomever we each individually believe in, I think I can say unequivocally that we are all grateful beyond measure.