For Evan

Several weeks ago, I was reading one of the garden blogs that I follow and read a comment from Pam who mentioned that she was planting a zoo garden in memory of her son. This, of course, struck a chord with me and I went to her blog to see about her garden and her son. Pam lost a young son to Bacterial Meningitis in November of 2006. She has a wonderful blog where she posts memories of Evan and also wonderful items about her two surviving children who are young as well. She has the most amazing way of telling us about something that Duncan is doing and seamlessly relating it to similar experiences with Evan. And she uses photos to show us both of the boys involved in whatever the post is about. I am really moved and in awe of her seemingly calm way of giving us an insight to her present life and her past in the most seamless and natural way. As I was perusing her blog I read about Evan's love for green balloons and the fact that they would be doing a balloon release on the second anniversary of his death on November 24. Since I have become a big fan of balloon releases since Scott died, I decided to join in and do a release for Evan on the 24th. I had an appointment near the one of the public gardens where I volunteer as a Master Gardener and decided that it would be a good spot to release Evan's balloon. I had a hard time finding a green one -- at first the person at the store told me that they didn't have any green balloons but I dug through the container marked "green" and found lots that looked teal but at the bottom there was a real green one. I wanted to take photos for Pam and since I was on my own, I had to be a bit creative. So I tied the ribbon to a bench and got the camera ready. It worked quite well -- I was able to pull to let the balloon go and start getting photos as it rose. Even though I couldn't see it in the screen on the camera, I got it in all the photos I took. Which must be a record for my camera on a sunny day! You can enjoy the photos below. Perhaps I'll do balloons for Scott's birthday from that garden as well!

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