The most unfair thing

I hate using qualifiers, like "the most unfair thing in the world", for surely anyone can come up with something more unfair.  Yet this blog entry from Lois Lowry does make one's heart turn. Isn't this completely unfair, to die when your little baby is only 2 years old?
 Of course it happens every day, but what a tragedy.

I hope that if Lois Lowry is out there, she forgives me for directly copy/pasting this into my own blog. 

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht

I am writing this from Germany, where I am visiting my granddaughter and her mom and stepdad, and where it has been snowing now for several days. We were delayed getting here from Zurich because of a snowstorm...and it hasn't stopped. Airports all over Europe are now closed though it appears that the snow will have ended by the time we leave here, flying out of Luxembourg, day after tomorrow.
Last night, despite the weather, we went to the town of Gorelstein, about 38 kilometers from here, for a chamber music concert in which Nadine's violin teacher was the lead violinist. There was something quite magical about being in a goregous old German church, listening to Bach, with snow falling outside. Driving home...with difficulty (twice we failed to make it up a snowy hill and had to take a different route)...on twisty narrow roads through woods and occasional villages, in the swirling snow, you could almost picture the brothers Grimm creating their tales. Wolves lurking in the snowy darkness didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.
My granddaughter is a typical teenager who plays violin, and dances, and rides horseback and goes to parties and is working on getting a driver's license (much more difficult in this country!) and who is at this moment working on her calculus homework.  But she is also an imaginative and gifted photographer who recently got a fine camera for her 17th birthday and has been creating some dramatic photos of herself:

This morning I had her do some photos of me for book-promotion purposes but they are the standard author-trying-to-look-scholarly photos, no fishnet or eye makeup!
Grandbeagle Luke has just been out for a run in the snow, and soon we will go through the snow to the next village to have dinner with Nadine's German grandparents, Katerina and Johann, who have lived there all their lives. My son Grey, Nadine's father, is buried in the beautiful little village cemetery there; she was only two when he died.

He would be so proud of her today.
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh
Sleep in heavenly peace