Late June in Brisbane and the days are brilliant. Chilly mornings giving way to bright sunshine skies. The air and the wind and the way the grass smells unlocking memories of him. These days when he shared the earth.

Come the 6th July the other memories will come. Unwelcome and unbidden. The moments that stole him away replayed in my mind. But for now, I am not thinking on that. I am remembering those two weeks he was here.

Recalling the smell of him and the soft peach fuzz of his hair. Memories I thought I had lost but that are carried in the air late June. I remember the cosy fog of the first few days. Sleep deprived and elated. That excited, bewildered, other-worldly place that belongs only to parents of the very newly born.

I remember proudly showing him off, so new and tiny. I remember friends holding him and drinking in his freshly bloomed loveliness. I remember fighting through a fog of sleepiness and taking him to meet his cousins one evening despite a day full of activity. Oh, I am so glad I did.

I remember feeling content and whole.

I remember gazing at him in adoration and asking my husband the most rhetorical of parental questions – isn’t he beautiful?

I remember the way he breathed a little too heavily and the midwife who worried and the doctor who did not.

I remember nursing him and thinking I’d give him the world. I remember calling him “my little love, my turtle dove”. I remember him curled up, cuddled into Ns chest, oblivious to the world as he slept. I remember singing him silly little songs and tracing his features as he slept.

Not so long ago, I was unable to recall these simple things. They would have been a dagger in my broken heart. But today, as the sun reached out and touched the grass, offering respite from the wind’s chill, the memories came flooding back. And I could accept them with open arms and be thankful for the 14 days he graced the earth.