I’ve just arrived back home in Melbourne, Victoria, after a few days in Queensland visiting and enjoying family. The weather was warm and pleasant, maybe a bit windy at times, but hardly a cloud in the sky, and my new and only great-granddaughter is a most beautiful child, calm and placid like her parents! I was lucky with the timing of my visit and was able to come home again because some more cases of this wretched coronavirus required our Victorian government to re-impose a lockdown whilst I was away. It was good that I travelled when I did, as no other Australian state would ‘let me in’ at this present time!

The weather in Melbourne, as I write this in the third day of winter, is also fine and warmish with no wind and a clear blue sky, although the nights are colder, just as they were in mid-coast Queensland last week. Later, in our winter here it will rain, and we’ll have lots of grey days. Just like our lives, those days will happen whether we like it or not, and we will be glad that life also includes several seasons even if, every so often, they will be as muddled as the local weather pattern!

I am often feeling ‘down in the dumps’, sad and missing my soul mate, and have to constantly remind myself that such feelings are regenerative of themselves and serve no purpose. That kind of melancholic introspection is so destructive of my life, and even worse when it makes me such poor company to others. Not that I am seeing ‘others’ at present in this lockdown! One strategy I use to regain some positive thoughts is to stop, take a breath and say a silent prayer – a prayer that God will help me focus on the here and now and remember that Dorothy has shaped me to be what I am, to give thanks for the way she kept me grounded and to look out for ways to help people and to never speak ill of anyone. Dorothy was always practical, always focussed on others, never just on herself. Those are her qualities (and many more), and they help me cope with life without her physical presence.

Doom and gloom had no place in Dorothy’s life, and that’s a legacy I will try to emulate and continue. Those of my readers who’ve lost a loved one (and that’s all of you, I know) will be smiling and hopefully agreeing that in the wintertime of our lives we can look forward to sunshine again even though it may not happen when we wish it! The weather often changes and, just as night follows day, we need to allow ourselves to accept the seasonality of our lives, to accept it and “find some happiness every day and do no harm to others on the way”. Fine sentiments. Now let me see if I can find that elusive sunshine next time it rains! The sun IS shining every day, somewhere. We just need to know that, and keep looking out for it, will you join me?