I wake up thinking about Kelsey.
She was my son’s favorite swimming teacher at the community pool.
Beyond her competency and kindness, I remember particularly liking her name because it combined both mine and my husband’s names–Kelly & Casey–which would have been the perfect name for our own daughter, if we had one, and if that name hadn’t already been a favorite of the man I loved before my husband. Awkward.
Life is like that. A bit of a comedian. My son’s first “girlfriend” from daycare had the first name of my husband’s ex and the last name of my ex.
I don’t know what this all means, but something, somewhere, must be paying attention. How else can I explain that our son was born on the anniversary of our first night together? Which just happens to be celebrated by Catholics as the Assumption of Mary. Which is only vaguely worth noting even with our mothers’ heritage; unless you combine it with the fact that my husband himself was born on the Feast Day of Mary and I was born on the Immaculate Conception of Mary–making our family a trifecta of the Divine Feminine; without even needing to mention that we happened to buy a piece of land and build a house across the pond from a summer camp owned by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.
But back to beautiful Kelsey who is the true inspiration of this piece.
What was stunning about the news that September, 2006, after the god awful loss, was the proximity. My husband and sons had been on that same road, just moments before, heading in the same direction. Toward that intoxicated driver. The one who confessed to shooting up 3 bags of heroin before he got into his truck.
Route 12 in Swanzey, New Hampshire, past the Cheshire Fair Grounds, is not a road our family typically travels. But there’s a Honda dealership down that way, and we had just received the bad news that our old car needed to be replaced, so my guys headed there to find one.
That new car, is now 9 years old, and yesterday, we got the same unexpected news, about it needing to be replaced, so we put in a call to that same dealership.
Which is how my mind drifted to Route 12 in Swanzey, and to the awful accident that took Kelsey’s and her boyfriend’s life. And to the roses that my son and I brought to the pool and weaved through the fence there.
Which wouldn’t have inspired this post, until I opened the newspaper and saw Kelsey’s picture, on the anniversary of her birthday.
Two Owls Calling 