I kept them as is.

I did not come to this decision by my own devices. Well, perhaps indirectly I did. I can only take so much credit as I keep posting these writings publicly, and by chance one or the other person looking after me stumbles across these things and has a suggestion.

But before that, I want to go back and provide a little bit of context ( Read more... )

About a decade or so ago, my Facebook news feed was filling up with dying cats. It seemed like all the kittens we had found, coaxed, adopted, bought, traded, rescued, tamed into our lives when we had first gotten our own place to live, during or after college, had come to the end of their last life and were dying or needing to be put down. This ( Read more... )

Mingo is sniffing around my desk, trying hard to find a space between my arms while I'm typing. Lucky for me, he's content to imitate a gargoyle on the corner by my elbow.

I took Friday off. It was Dad's birthday. I thought I would need it. Certainly when I looked up my sick days and my personal days, trying to decide which would be most ( Read more... )

Dad's funeral is coming up soon. Very soon. Like, this-time-next-week-it-will-be-over soon.

And naturally, I'm dreading it. I've been avoiding it all summer.

But everything is ready, or as ready as I can make it.

The programs are being printed, I added pictures to the autobiography of his that I'd rediscovered and those are being printed off, the ( Read more... )

Yesterday was the anniversary of the last day that I saw my father alive. I only know this because Facebook's unwittingly brutal "on this day" feed told me, though if I were one to believe more fervently in angels or spirits or ghosts, then I would have known without the aid of technology.

Because he was everywhere.

Usually on any given day I run ( Read more... )

The first thing that I will mention as a one off, take it as you will, but I must mention it for the benefits it has brought, is that I am reading a book, H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. We share a number of things. We write, we love birds, our fathers passed away, we tried as educated people to be proactive about grief and study it and read it, ( Read more... )

My father died.

I found out in stages.

The first one - though arguably, there are any number of firsts, but I will talk here only of the physical - was when I found out he had a variety of cancers that could not easily be dismissed. His skin cancer was never much of an issue, like his colon or prostate cancer, or whichever one it was, that they ( Read more... )

It has been a long, long stretch of wordlessness, of barely even being able to muster the energy to open up Scrivener and re-read what you've written, let alone come up with something new to add. Unable, even, to implement a simple correction.

I'm not saying this to be dramatic. It has been a drought. That I am writing about this is monumental to ( Read more... )

This summer will be one of journeying to places to find my way back to my creativity.

The first week of summer, the one on  the cusp of the solstice, will be spent on Martha's Vineyard.  It is a single week, and the classes I am choosing to attend are only in the afternoons. But it gives me time to write, spend time with words and navigate my way ( Read more... )

It's been over a week since I've come home, specifically, home to Germany. It feels foreign to say that, not only because I have since bought my own home, or because I've been away for well over two decades, but specifically because nothing looks the same. Not that I expected it to, but if I were tasked to point to a room and say, "that, that still ( Read more... )