Thinking about eagles and light and stars

Our drive down to The Lake today confirmed our reasons for going there at least once a day just to see what's new.  Today we were surprised to see that the ice in the channel of water leading into the marina was nearly totally SMOOTH!  And this is strange because the last time we saw it on Saturday, it was a jumbled mess of frozen ice chunks.  So, what happened?  How did it get all smoothed out because it certainly wasn't any result of melting!  It's been too cold for that.  But it's also been very windy, so perhaps surface water blew inland and everything froze to almost a skating-rink smooth condition.  Just a hypothesis, of course..."I'm not a scientist."  (Hmmm, where have I heard that before?)

Our other sighting today was eagles--actually four eagles!  They were sitting out on the ice edges and finding something tasty to interest them out there.  

Here's two of them together.  The other two were over to the west but even further out...so even smaller specks in my picture.  While we were there, we saw Laura Erickson who does a blog about birds--Laura's Birding Blog.  She is from Duluth but has family connections here and often comes to visit her favorite bird haunts.  Today she was looking for snowy owls which have been seen here lately, but not by us!

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What's really been on my mind lately has been my cousin, Ingabritt, from Sweden-now-Greece.  Early yesterday morning I received an email from her husband, Harry (Hariton), telling me that she had passed away on Saturday.  She is the person who was my inspiration to begin blogging just a year ago when I reconnected with her for the first time since the early 1980's.  In spite of breast cancer and all the necessary treatments since 2007, she has lived life to the fullest as a journalist, wife, mother of three, and friend to many!  I'm so glad I found her last year.

 I met her husband, Harry, when we visited Ingabritt in Stockholm in 1979.  Jeff and I were on a three-week Eurail trip through Europe after being discharged from the Army in Augsburg, Germany.  Harry was an astronomy student back then and is now an astronomer in Greece.  In an email I received from him today, he said that as part of the UNESCO 2015 International Year of Light, highlighting for the world the importance of light and optical technology in our lives, he was able to name a star Ingabritt-Maria in her name.  So nice!  I usually go out on our front porch on clear nights to see the stars and check for northern lights.  Our dark skies always make it a great show!

I hope I'm not sharing too much, but he also said that she was brave and at peace to the end.  Her daughter will be having a baby any day now and Ingabritt was sitting up and knitting baby clothes for her first grandchild until Friday, the day before she passed away!  I knew she was my mentor for my blogging project, but today I realized she will also be my mentor on how to live and now even on how to face death.  What a gift!

Adjö, Ingabritt, och många tack!