Different Flowers from the Same Garden

I am writing this early as I have an important and emotional reunion a few hundred miles away, and I will not have time to write this later. (As a result, there is also one more entry before this that you may not have read.) Anyway, I have risen early in preparation for this trip. It was still dark as I lumbered across the main road in my running kit past the unfinished roadworks. (I am not a natural jogger but do it because I know that it is good for me.) Once I had connected my breathing to the rhythm of my running I was fine. Thoughts. The space you inhabit when you run is a great place for thoughts. For about eight years as a schoolboy I ran every morning, through wind, sleet, rain, and snow, and I don't believe it ever quite leaves you, this feeling that you should be running at the break of each day. At one moment, steam rose from a building's hot water system to my right. I was thinking about my five sisters whom I will be meeting later today. We are coming together in the heart of the country - in the former capital for our illustrious ancestors from across the choppy seas, in fact. It will be a poignant reunion. It always is but this one will be more poignant than ever. One of our six (five plus one) is dying. We are talking months not years. For as long as I can remember there have been no parents around - those whom the gods love die young - so the whole procedure will have its characteristic rudderlessness, though it will be bound with affection. I am the only male and the youngest and have tried hard at times, I like to think, to bunch us together. (I make it sound like flowers in a vase.) When you come at something like this from as abstract a beginning as my own you also experience a kind of alarming clarity about what families really are. When, if you like, any kind of unconditional familial protocol is not in place, only one's wits can take over. The love is secure all right: it just isn't grounded. When you have your own family however, and I am only just beginning to grasp this, it is almost as if the slate is wiped clean, and everything, including the hope, respect, and love you have anyway, is fresh again. No, it will be quite something, something very tender I suspect, seeing my five sisters again, especially as most of our attention will be directed towards the sickest in our ranks. The truth is, I am not very close to my sisters. But I have, in my own way, looked out for them, kept a quiet eye on them, all my life.