Laura's room has become a kind of sitting room for us.  Nearly everything of Laura is still there: her collections, her books, stuffed animals, clothes and shoes still at the ready and, on display, many items from and about her life.  She had a good little television and we often all gathered there to watch something together, and still do.  There's a trio of photos propped up on the white chest in her room and every night when I turn off her little Hello Kitty lamp there, I say good night to her, speaking to those photos, including this one of her as a smiling 7 year old.

It's been raining and misting on and off for days now.  What I used to call the "Misty Days",  a brief season that we have most Novembers, that I was always eager to point out to the girls when they were young, and the occasion to quote them a favorite poem, "The Mist and All," by Dixie Willson.

Early November is the time the Japanese Maples around our yard seem to transform overnight from a somber shade of olive  to a brilliant shades of red and orange.  All of Laura's growing up years, she would have glimpsed the fiery color through our windows and admired it around our yard.  

In the tangled garden, there's still a few roses blooming as well as  snapdragons.  And in the woods around our yard, the Witch Hazel are in bloom.

I wasn't going to go there but I will.  It was two years ago that we slogged through the flooded roads, on a very rainy November day, fearing with the traffic we would miss the show Laura was so eager to see but we did make it, finding after long  delays on NJ roads and at the Tunnel, that in the last stretch our travels proceeded quickly, that we could make our way unhindered through the rainy streets of Manhattan, amid lights gleaming everywhere on the wet pavement,  to reach the theater and with helpful assistance getting us to our seats,  sit down, somehow dazed that our luck in traveling had turned around so quickly, for although the show was already underway, we had not missed much.  Yes, the show was Wicked. If we were all soon transfixed by the show, I'm not sure what word describes listening to Elphaba singing "For Good."    Did I know somehow then what that song would come to mean to me or was it that Ana Gasteyer as Elphaba rendered it so extraordinarily, or both.  

Well, read on, if you willing to have a mist in your eye, for below is a portion of "For Good"  which you will remember was read at Laura's Memorial Service, that was to come, astoundingly, only two months later:

"It may be

That we will never meet again

In this lifetime

So let me say before we part

So much of me

Is made of what I learned from you

You'll be with me

Like a handprint on my heart

And now whatever way our stories end

I know you have re-written mine

by being my friend

Like a ship blown from its mooring

By a wind off the sea

Like a seed dropped by a skybird

In a distant wood

Who can say if I've been changed for the better?

But because I knew you...

because I knew you...

I have been changed for good..."