Memories of a green-eyed girl

No profound words, just sweet memories.
     Cissy and I driving back from a vacation in Maine, stopped dead in turnpike traffic, engines and drivers growling, irritation hanging over the highway like exhaust, horns beeping, people yelling. And Cissy, reaching into her suitcase and pulling out one of those dime-store bottles of bubbles that you blow through a little plastic circle. Bubbles floating down the stalled interstate, children reaching out of their windows, laughter rising, a barometric change starting, Cissy laughing and blowing more bubbles.
     Cissy, just rousing from a surgery to save her life, the fuzzy stuffed cat I’d given her under her arm, smiling, her eyes green as the sea.
     Dawn at a remote campsite on Lake Umbagog, no creatures around us but moose. I zip open my tent and see… nothing. Fog has set in like cataracts. I can’t even see Cissy’s tent feet away. Finally I hear her stir. We grope toward each other, then grope toward the picnic table we know is somewhere nearby so we can make coffee. Then, we stumble toward the lake, steaming mugs in hand, stand at the edge of the water and wait until first the shrouded lake is revealed, then the far shore, then the trees, as if we are watching a Polaroid develop, standing there together in speechless awe.
     Don’t’ get me wrong. She was human like all of us. She could be prickly and maddening and I know we drove each other crazy sometimes.
     But the bigger part of her was loving and giving and generous to a fault, blower of bubbles, giver of gifts, lover of life.
     Tomorrow, her brother Richard arrives to execute her estate, which I am sure he will do ably and lovingly. Plans for any services will be given as soon as they’re determined.
     Today, Rick and I spent most of the day in the garden, pulling up old landscape fabric, yanking out last year’s weeds, roto-tilling the soil into tidy little rows, trying desperately and in vain to impose order on our helplessness.