Have you ever had a memory flash through your mind that is so real and tangible, it’s almost like it was happening at the moment you remembered it?

Today, clear as a bell, I had a memory of myself as a child looking out the window in winter. When I was really little, we lived in a very old house. The windows were large and original to the house, and weren’t all air tight like modern windows.

Today I remembered the windows in winter time. The smell of the cold and the crisp cold air leaking in from the outside. I remembered looking out the window onto a snowy street and then blowing on the window to make a little cold frosty pattern that then quickly disappeared. And then just like that, the memory was gone.

This has been a bit of a weird week.

Yesterday I got a Facebook reminder that an old friend was having a birthday. This was a woman I hadn’t seen in many years because life had taken her way out of state where she had gotten married and started a family.

A few years ago we had reconnected and sporadically had kept in touch with an occasional call mostly to leave a message, or Facebook message. So yesterday I went to her Facebook page to say happy birthday. Only what I saw was a post for someone I don’t know saying she had died.

Google, that thing that is a blessing and a curse of online research, led me to her obituary. It really got to me. I was also upset that although one of this woman’s siblings was actually in my class in high school and there was a third sister that somehow people that knew this friend never knew she had died. Out of sight and out of mind in the saddest of ways.

Yesterday I had another one of those crystal clear flashes of memory. I saw my friend basically as I had last seen her. She was a petite woman with a beautiful smile that was almost shy as it developed at times and sometimes it was wistful and other times mischievous. She also had this deep throaty voice. The memory made me smile through tears.

Today another friend said goodbye to her dad. He had been ill and on hospice. When I was talking to her on her way home from saying good bye to her dad and starting the frenetic process of everything that falls under that horrible phrase “final arrangements” I had my third flash of a memory for this week. Of my own father, two days before he died and when he was on hospice.

It was my parents’ wedding anniversary. We watched a movie. The original Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn I think it was. My father turned his head slightly on the pillow and smiled a slight and very weak smile. That is my last memory of him. And then today, poof the memory was gone.

And you know what else in this week of flash memories and weirdness? Trees full of lots of cardinals in my back garden. Every day. About a dozen, if not more. I heard an old wives tale once long ago that said a lot of people feel cardinals appearing represent loved ones or people you cared about and knew who had passed away. When you see them, supposedly those who had gone before you are visiting. Makes you wonder.

Thanks for stopping by.