a visitation

My kids were up this weekend. Jesse, the older boy, was telling me how he got in trouble with the bus driver - they catch the bus to school, it visits their village and Patonga, the next one down, before winding back over the hill to Umina. One of the things the kids have been doing is gathering flowers by the roadside and decorating the windows of the bus with them. Hibiscus, mostly, from what I could tell. The driver tolerates this but one day some of these flowers were left strewn on the ground and he became annoyed. I don't think it was serious.

Anyway, I was asking Jesse about this and he was telling me where and how they pick the flowers, when his eyes took on a faraway look and his expression became a bit otherworldly. There were these white flowers, he said. Too high up for me to pick. They were whiter than the whitest white and when I looked at them I had a feeling like some god was near.

He couldn't say what kind of flower they were but later, when we were out walking, Liamh, the younger one, pointed out some that were like those other ones. I asked Jesse again about what he meant: Did you say God was there? I asked. No, he said, it was like a god was near.