Waving Good-Bye

  As I sat next to my son at the DMV today, waiting for our number to be called, I found myself suddenly fighting back tears.

 I'm not sure if there's a word for the emotion that causes these unbidden tears, but I know most parents are all too familiar with them. They're the ones you cry when something wonderful happens, but in that bit of wonderful, you feel you've lost something too.
 They're the tears you cry when your child says their first words or takes their first steps.
 They're the ones that fall when you drop them off for their first day of school or they ride their bike without training wheels for the first time.
They're the ones you cry behind the closed front door when they leave to spend the night away from home for the first time or to go out on their first date.

 They're also the tears you cry when they buy their first car.

 Well, I managed to make it out of the DMV without embarrassing either of us. I made it through the ride home, I made it through putting the new licence plates on his car, and I even made it through the hug and kiss he gave me when he thanked me for all my help.

  Watching his smiling face as he drove down the street waving good-bye, that proved to be a little too much for me.
   The tears finally won the fight.

Lazarus and The Two Finned Nine

  Sometime last week I depressed everyone, including myself, with my sad 'Little Rays of Sunshine" tale.
  Well, weep no more.
 Since the fish were gone, I decided to empty the pond so I could clean it. When I got down to about five inches of extremely murky water, I noticed a large, orange spot on the bottom of the pond. "What is that? Leaves?" I asked my husband. Then the orange spot started to move.
 "My fish!" I screamed (my neighbors for 3 blocks around don't need to read this post. They definitely heard me).
  It's true. The fish are alive and well and living in the pond. I don't know how they eluded me that day. The water was murky, but I thought, for sure, with all my poking around, they would've surfaced. They must have been hiding in the leaves at the bottom, traumatized by the Heron.
 The only other excuse I can think of is, perhaps it's some type of Easter season miracle; I did find the fish three days after I thought they were gone.