Farewell

My father passed away on 6 April and, while we bade him farewell at the time, it is now time to bid farewell to the house in which he and my mother lived for the past 23 years. It is a farmhous in rural Andhra Pradesh and, knowing my mother couldn't live there alone, he left it to the Little Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy requesting that they use it as a home for the poor. The Sisters will take it over on 30 April. We were all for this because it gave him a lot of peace to know that the house he built would be of help to poor people for generations to come.

This post is dedicated to the farmhouse garden. We spent many hours there and I will remember the early morning walks among the lime and mango trees; the early evening hours on the lawn listening to the calls of the beecatchers, crow pheasant, kingfishers, egrets and other birds as they visited the pond, shrubs and trees; and the late evening walks along the drive way, inhaling the fragrance of frangipani.