Day 41

Such a strange snow day with no snow!  The meteorologists were entirely wrong this time!  The wind is raging outside though tonight, and it is very cold now, and a dusting of snow on the ground.  Molly and I ran 2.8km today, and it would be nice to lope along in as carefree a manner as Molly does.  Ten years ago in South Africa I would never have imagined that I would be running with soft snow falling on my bare arms in America, a  crazy black dog following at my heels!

I watched an HBO movie on Winston Churchill this evening while I was washing up.  It made me ponder war.  I was born ten years after the second world war ended, but it was of course the defining experience for my parents' generation.  My dad was an officer in the British Airforce.  My mother was a WAF (women's auxiliary forces) in South Africa and they met while she was handing out uniforms to the new British troops who had just arrived in Cape Town.  The British troops had been on their way to Singapore, but their ship was torpedoed and they had to stop in at Cape Town Harbour instead. 

I grew up hearing Churchill's speeches, how he was a hero, Britain's saviour.  He was a truly brilliant orator, and he actually received the Nobel prize for Literature! In this movie they portray Clementine, his wife, as an intelligent woman who knew him well.  She once said, "I think Winston has played war games all his life, and now this one is real."   

So this is a picture of my mother during the war, before she had any children, before she was even married, I think.  Young and full of unlimited potential, and now her whole life has gone by and she is dead.  So brief, this life.  My sister often says that I am the spitting image of my mother, (she knew her for a lot longer than I did) and when I was younger I sometimes had people who had known her as a child or young woman come up to me on the street and say, "You must be Joan Webster's daughter!" without my mother even having been present!