*Sigh*

Life is probably as it should be. As sad and difficult as that may be, at times, to understand and accept, it’s as true and right and unquestionable as anything else. Life is at it should be. You reach a certain age, and you begin to wonder how come you never paid attention before, why you never noticed that with each change of season, your life becomes less and less about living, and more and more about something else. It’s like that silly song my children loved at bedtime. They never knew I had a difficult time singing it. The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah… They’d giggle at my grossness… the littlest one stopped to pick her nose, hurrah, hurrah, but they had no clue my inflections were tinged with sadness. I always wondered why they didn’t get it. What were they hearing? Did they think the ants would send a rescue team back through the forest looking for the ones left behind? But I guess life really is as it should be. They’ll probably sing the same song to their children, wincing in the soft glow of a nite lite as the song marches on and on. This, for me, has been a season for saying goodbye to a generation of people who, in passing on, are bringing to the surface so much of what I thought I’d ignored as a child. With each goodbye, I feel myself stooping over under the weight of an understanding that doesn’t really make me a smarter person, just more resigned, sadder, more in tune to the fact that my words will probably come back to haunt my children when it’ll be their turn to see that, yup, life is probably as it should be.