That Is How We Lived, Happily And

Looking After A Very Sick Child Was The Olympics Of Parenting.

I Was Astonished To Find That The Positions My Grandfather Had Defended Were Now Overgrown And Entangled With Trees And Thorns. I Suppose I Had Developed A Sense Of Reverence For The Locations He Described In His Memoirs And Letters - The Forts And The High Emplacements. I Had Expected Them To Have Been Preserved In Some Way.

I Wanted To Look At The Differences Between How We Fought Then And How We Fight Now, Because The Current Lack Of Closure Generates A State Of Psychological Unease That Is Interesting To Acknowledge And Examine.

We Were Exiles From Reality That Summer. We Were Refugees From Ourselves.

On Our Honeymoon We Talked And Talked. We Stayed In A Beachfront Villa, And We Drank Rum And Lemonade And Talked So Much That I Never Even Noticed What Color The Sea Was. Whenever I Need To Stop And Remind Myself How Much I Once Loved Andrew, I Only Need To Think About This. That The Ocean Covers Seven Tenths Of The Earth's Surface, And Yet My Husband Could Make Me Not Notice It.