Saturday morning and all seems to be back to what we call normal. After a successful book launch party at The Book Nook last night, Wendy is again on the move between Buffalo and Fredonia, NY – a one hour trip which she will do three times today – and we here at home will be going to visit my dad in the hospital. He was moved out of the Intensive Care Unit to the Cardiac Care Unit last evening and is talking again, giving the nurses a hard time and telling them (demanding is a better word) which medicines he needs. We did overhear one nurse tell him that she is a bigger pain in the butt than he could be, so we felt good about that.

One of the things we haven’t mentioned yet is “the birds.” We in this family still feel very connected to our loved ones who have passed on and when we see certain birds, we truly feel their presence with us. For example, when my mom was in her last year, she would sit by the windows and look out at the cardinals who lived in the nearby shrubbery and feel cheered by their color and energy. During that time, I happened to be at the show of a local painter and purchased a nice oil painting of a cardinal and gave it to her. Since then, we always feel better about things we have going on when we see the cardinals. We always know that my mom is with us and things will work out for the best.

Thursday night when my dad was rolled out of surgery into the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit looking like he was run over by a train, he was of course hooked up to a number of tubes, iv’s, monitors and pumps. As my sister, brother and I went in to be with him, we were amazed to see that much of the equipment was made by a company called Cardinal Health with little red cardinals as their logo. Right then we knew that if our dad could be surrounded by all these cardinals watching over him, he would be ok.