"I’ll become a blue sky and watch over you." -Tae-hwa

I know that my mother is always with me. I know in my heart that she protects me and guides me in so many ways. I have had example after example these last twenty-two years, too many to not believe. Yesterday I had another....

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a homebody, and weekends are my paradise. I love to be home, I love to putter and cook and not go anywhere. Yesterday was the local Olde Tyme Christmas and spectacular Parade of Lights. CG and I were in the parade with the library float. So, I had to fix myself up and head out in to the world, grudgingly. We left the house at 4 o'clock to head to the 6 o'clock parade.  Another weird qurk I have is being early, to everything, all the time. Just minutes after we had left there was a horrible car accident, in our front yard.

A woman, a woman that I know, was trapped in her car for over an hour. My husband was there with her the whole time, listening to and watching her pain. He said it was horrible.

I could never, ever have been there and seen that.

When my mother and sister were in their accident, just a little farther down the road from this one, I was not home. I was at a concert, with a boy whose name I don't even remember and wouldn't be back for hours. I didn't know. I didn't feel anything. I didn't live at home and I visited very rarely. Friends and partying were more fun than my family. That wasted time with my mother haunts me everyday.

I have a thin veneer of normalcy I wear over my pain, seeing that woman suffer would have shattered it. My mother knew I couldn't see that. We left early, we missed it by moments.  We were gone for hours, until the accident was erased from my own yard.

As a mother I know that not even death would stop me from protecting my daughter.

I learned that from my own mother.