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It’s days like today, half cold of winter and half thaw of spring, that bring me back to last year.

Nana getting sick.

Visiting her in the hospice facility. The beautiful early spring weather, the vibrant colors and smells of awakening flowers, grass, trees and earth outside and the medicinal stuffy and choking smell of death and suffering inside. I associate the two now in some sort of odd and twisted marriage.

And for now…bizarrely I find some comfort in that…I would go back to those visits in a heartbeat.

I don’t think this will last forever. I should imagine (a phrase Nana actually used quite often that I’ve adopted – is it a colloquialism? I don’t know it’s derivation…) that one day I will simply smell the lush scents of seasonal renewal and not imagine the antiseptic, the bodily fluids, the bad and burnt coffee along with the sounds of the beeping life monitors, the look of the institutionally shiny hospital floors…the sad, resigned, often bewildered but strongly resolute look in Nana’s eyes.

But it will be a long time from now.

When that time does come I hope to embrace the sensory beauty of spring with the thoughts of better scents, better sounds and better days.