on living and dying fast

i went as soon as my husband was home from his travels, and could watch our son. I was lucky, i got to spend a good day with my sister, where she was awake, mostly, and alert, and she knew me.

I didn't know what to do. Terminal illness, when treatment has concluded, doesn't take a lot of time. My other sister, my one remaining sister, and my stepfather had the routine perfected. And the pride of the patient, which always came between us, wouldn't allow me a lot of hands on time.

But i couldn't just walk away, and just as i knew in my guts on Friday it was time to get up there, i woke up Saturday morning knowing exactly what i had to do. It was like i was channeling my mother. They needed someone to cook.

To be fair, my oldest sister was the best cook, the one who had the most years and most attention from mom. I was always destined for a career, so it surprises me still when i know how to do things without looking up directions. Osmosis.

It is also Thanksgiving week. Being in my mother's house, despite the circumstances, meant it was wrong not to have things around for guests to nibble on, for distraught family members to take nourishment from.

So I went to the grocery store, and i cooked. I bought thigns for sandwiches, soup, casseroles, and pie Yes. Pie.

I believe that those things, the soup and the pie, chocolate, made from scratch, were the last things on this earth my sister tasted.

My flight home took six hours. When i left her this morning, she was resting peacefully, breathing well, but sound asleep. I stroked her hair and said, I'll see you later.

I knew as i said the words, the same ones i said to my mother the last time i saw her, that i wouldn't.


She lived fast. She didn't finish high school, though she got a GED later. She married 4 times, though twice to the same man. She had three children. She leaves a grandson.

She started smoking cigarrettes across the street from the jr high when she was 12, because it was cool, and because her sister who was such a "good girl" wouldn't like it.

She had a bad cough that she saw the doctor for in June. By then the cancer was stage 4.

She was 48 years old.

She died before my plane landed in Houston.

She once said, when asked about current events, that she didn't care about that stuff. If it didn't touch her world directly, then it didn't really matter. Life is relative, you know.

I thought that way about her for many years. But I was wrong.

i was wrong.

Rest in peace, little sister.

Still trying

So i've been telling the folks at Ipowerweb, who host my website, that it hasn't been working, since March. Actually, as I review past entries, i see it's been since may. Still, i can't edit, can't upload and even though i think that i don't really care if anyone reads these little blurbs, it seems i do... if i didn't care, i'd continue to write entries and save to draft.

I'd switch to blogger save, but then anyone who clicked my domain link would not see. So frustrating. My annual fee is up for renewal in a few days.. i suppose that means they will handle it.

or not.

anyone know a good hosting service?

just more late night words

Busy week, full and stressful, just the way i like them. But I've neglected the non profit, must get the 501 c3 app filed soon, and the novel lies in dusty stacks all around the office.

I got a copy of the latest anthology in which my work appears in the mail, and even my critical editor child gave the book and the contents good marks. And i got paid.. which makes it even more of a banner week. I know, a good promoter would link her to the amazon site to order, would shamelessly pim the project, but i'm not doing that here. Maybe on the website if i ever get the isp to respond to the publishing issues. The contract is up the end of this month, so if nothing else, i'll switch then. There are just sooo many files.

A few months ago i created another blog for my second life character. i will link you here to it, but not it to you... too much crossover I think. But so far in my almost one year of SL, I've gone through three careers. And I always come back to words for solace.

Depression has been at clinical levels for about a month now. I've promised myself that if i can't break the patterns this week, i'll go in for the medication. Or take the one that i've left sealed in my bathroom vanity since 2004.

but that's another story, and these posts aren't showing up, so i'll leave this to edit another day.

yet another test

trying again... going to switch isp's

august

Reading my friend Fred always makes me want to write as well as he does. He's just journaling. I remember just journaling, but for almost 8 months now, I've abstained. In some ways, it got to feeling like those Christmas letters I quite sending about five years ago… like what I was doing was putting my life out there like I was bragging or something. Not sure why, especially when most of the people who read me lead far more interesting lives, but I guess it's the way I was brought up. You share bad things; you keep good things quiet so that the people around you who aren't feeling so good don't feel worse. It was an upbringing where the negative was always stressed, the positive taken in stride. I don't much care for that.

Right now I am sitting outside the cottage in Michigan, the view of the blue lake available over my shoulder, across the empty lot and through some trees. Not the perfect view of a bluff side cottage, but the safe view of one far enough back for mortgages. When we bought the place, banks wouldn't lend lakeside. The risk of their collateral ending up as trinkets on the beach was just too high.

The air is warm with an edge of crisp morning chill. The newscasters say it is the hottest week in Michigan so far this year. Coming from the sauna of Texas, I feel like I am breathing for the first time in a year. Maybe that is why I am finally writing.

I have bare feet. Grains of sand cling to them and make me a bit uncomfortable, like I am dirty. I am not. Except for the grains of sand.

There is a different value system at a lake cottage in Michigan and a suburb in Houston. Grains of sand on bare feet are valued here, but there, I feel under dressed if my toes aren't perfectly polished and encased in new or nearly new shoes. Part of it is beach mentality I know. Part of it is just not caring about details. Or maybe recognizing which details matter. I don't know.

Today is my last day here this year. I think that has more to do with the writing today than anything else. It took eight months away, and two weeks at the lake to want to do this, and I am afraid the next break will not have an ending.

And I ask myself, so what?

i'm having issues with uploading photos, and am now wondering if words are a problem too. If this works, i'll be back

playing with words

Recently I had a conversation with a songwriter that reminded me how easy it is to play with words and how much fun it can be. I think that many of us who consider ourselves "writers" fall into a trap of taking ourselves too seriously, trying to hard to be good and forgetting the value of telling a story, or expressing an emotion just the way we feel it.

Last week, for example, I had a few "moments" where I found myself saying, this, this is the essence of what I want to say, just remember this scene, write it down, feel it. Oh so artistic! But when I finally got back to my desk, booted up Word, (so dusty from non use!) I could only remember the place, and not the sensations. So much for writing when I get to it.

Today begins the challenge of "summer." The last day of school marks freedom for my son, but increased pressure on making time for work and writing for me. It has been this way every year since I moved my office home. Every summer I think about moving back out to the commercial district, but then I go to a meeting or conference and remember that I was at the beginning of a trend, not a follower, and that it is easier now than ever to work from a home office.

I promised myself that I would write something before my 10 o clock meeting, and it's time to leave for that now. This will place hold for that "moments" thoughts I had, and will make me get back to them. I'm going to seriously attempt daily blogging for a while, see if I can get back into a mode of discipline.

marching on

It is closer to morning on Wednesday than night on Tuesday, but I can't sleep. If my contacts didn't hurt so much, or my glasses would stay together, I'd just stay up tonight. Neither of those are the case.

I've been nagged. I have been on hiatus. hell no, i've been lazy. Playing games, playing house, playing play. Yet none of it makes me feel as though there is anything to show for the days that have passed, and i don't even have littel blog entries that i can point to for explanation. A kind of depression, a kind of head in the sand let it all go by kind of season. I've let myself detach in a way that is too much like what i always never wanted to be. The only connection to the person capable of that judment, that "what i always never wanted to be ness" comes when i can spit the words out of my way and just write.

I had a moment last week. I had a moment when the novel came alive and all the critiques i'd heard finally came together. I know now how to get all the characters in the same room together, which is the goal, they tell me, of a complex multi plotted novel. I didn't know it was suppoed to be so easy. That's why i go to workshops.

My goal in January was to write 20 flash pieces in that month, and I wrote only two. I had also a goal of having sections of the novel finished for each presentation time in workshop, and i did that. Not completely dead i suppose, but certainly in need of resuscitation.

I'll edit this tomorrow. If you read before then, all i have to say is that it is 4:09 am, and i've not slept.

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up,
at least a little bit. -Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)