birthdays are beautiful

 

 

Birthdays are beautiful ways to celebrate life and love.  This year was my first Facebook birthday, which added an exciting new dimension to the many “joyeux anniversaire’’ cards, telephone calls, flowers, kisses, hugs and les cadeaux
(the gifts) I received. There in my email box was a long string of more than 30 Facebook greetings from  my “friends’’,
people I had known for years and new connections.

 

I remember reporting on a top 10 list of qualities needed to build relationships and gift-giving was one – along with
using terms of endearment. These are the all-important doing verbs of the noun “love’’ and my birthday over-flowed with acts of endearment – and celebratory events.

 

There was another dimension this year, too, to mark my 67th birthday – an outpouring of kindness from friends.
Not the least of these was from former work colleague, now personal friend, Samela, who invited husband Olivier and myself to share a meal  with husband Bruce and their friends Barb and Brian on the night of my birthday.

Conversation flowed as freely until we were summoned to the dining table. A grand home-stuffed,
oven-baked chook, laid with bacon rashers made a magnificent piece-de-resistance. Its steaming herbaceous aroma filled the space as Bruce poured another top drop. Why did we forget our camera to capture such a delicious moment?

We slept over, too, and over scrummy scrambled eggs I gazed over Encounter
Bay as the waves rolled to shore. And I thought how friendship is such a human gift – one to the other and
how we glow emotionally in its warmth.

The adult children arrived on Saturday, Felicia driving from Melbourne to our island home while Tyson and Vanessa came from Adelaide where we adjourned to Currency Creek for a Duck-Off, a delicious feast of three great duck dishes from three competing chefs.

 

Somethiing was amiss, though, this night, because husband Olivier had to retire to the car half-way through the event
because of chronic back pain.  How could we foresee that the joy of my birthday, within days, was to become despair and
sadness as life turned over to another dark chapter.

 

Be Sociable, Share!

1 Comment to “birthdays are beautiful”

  1. By Julie House, 16/08/2011 @ 10:16 am

    It sounds like a beautiful, and well deserved birthday. May you have many happy returns, Nadine.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a Reply