March 22

This may well be my corniest entry yet, but that's okay. Sometimes I'm corny.

This is a bud on our pear tree. I remember the landscaper assuring me that though the old blooms had fallen away and the branches were chopped until nearly nothing remained, it would come back. I'd have that thought -- it'll come back-- each and every time I looked out my slider into the backyard. But it wasn't until today that I realized how much I have in common with that tree.

Watching Logan suffer, endure treatment, and then die anyway left me worn in ways I can't even begin to describe. Chopped. Pulverized. Just a hair shy of destroyed.

But in the back of my head, I think I always knew that eventually, I would come back.

None of this is to say that I'm back all the way, because I'm definitely not. I'm still worn out, and I feel like an inadequate parent no matter what I do. After all, I couldn't save my own child. But I'm getting better. Like the tree, I'm starting to feel like I'm opening up and becoming receptive to life again.

And for all of that, I'm grateful.