One of the things I have noticed as I get older is how you never know when you are making a memory that will last the rest of your life. A sound, a smell, a situation can all bring back certain memories so clearly.

I have one so vivid I have written about it before. When I was seven a neighborhood woman who had befriended all the kids in our hood died. She seemed ancient, but as I look back, I am sure she was probably in her 50's. I also have a suspicion she may have been a pretty good drinker in retrospect. She certainly was jolly and always had a glass of something in her hand. I remember the ambulance in front of her house and later a man explaining to us that she had passed. Now I am sure I had somewhat of a concept of death, even at that tender age, more of a 'flush the goldfish down the toilet and say a prayer' understanding, but it suddenly hit me all at once at how life actually worked, and I was part of that equation. Death became real, not abstract. I remember sitting alone on the curb and musing on death. It was a windy day, and I could hear a tether ball clasp clanging against a steel pole from across the street. I can still see every crack in the curb, a daisy weed growing in one of the cracks, and a trail of ants crawling along in the gutter. Every detail of that moment is as clear in my mind as the day it happened.

As a geriatric CNA in Florida, I saw quite a bit of death, and that vison of the seven-year-old me sitting on the curb would always come back to me at the moment a patient died. It became a comforting image, a realization that everything is changing constantly,

and it is best to surf life and enjoy the flow. Life is short....