Are you a weathered post supporting more weight than any trespasser has a right to expect? What is the last feeling of the bygone era, the last first-person blessing or curse to be landed against a too well-known opponent? Mom, does the emptiness of loss cast a sidelong knowing-sort-of glance, a nod of recognition even, before he pulls away yet another rug?
Family is so important. It’s where you come from. It’s who will care about you, no matter what. We all need that. We are lucky when we have that and now, my own daughter to be torn away from me by these terrible times. Why should she suffer and be called names and have stones thrown at her. But why should she have to leave to have a decent life.
It is eight years since Carole left and we have to find her. First we have to get back to our home in Germany, but what a mess we go through. We must get across the Polish Corridor and then still so far, with everything miserable and broken. People die on the platform just waiting for the train;
Fifty-nine dead. Fifty-nine dead from one family. That’s a numbing loss, without even thinking about the zeroes that bear down from hundreds, thousands, and millions. Fifty-nine dead in my family, their not-breath filling the wind that cuts my cheek, not-lit candles at holiday dinners, non-hugs from grandmas and grandpas. Each missing member suffered immeasurably: torture; [...]
The life she crafts—unconsciously and with fierce determination—is Goddess at her core. She is that composite we never really see in our lifetime, that we often don’t trust to be there—that vast well-spring we might not even dare to be. But we are here, anyway, in spite of ourselves or with calculated assertion.
When my parents were still here for me, I asked and avoided, I listened and ignored. When I became a parent, all that programming poured from my firmware and wanted control. Would I live the legacy or change it?
From an early age, I gave my daughter expert coaching in ice-cream cone management. I knew iced cream would be an important part of her future, so I approached this as a valuable skill to be handed down and practiced. You circle the cone, working the meeting of cone and ice cream…
“Laura was a free spirit. I wasn’t like that; I was very traditional. But Laura could do anything. You’re like her that way. I admired her.” These words were from Madeleine, a friend of my Mom’s from Gimbals’ days, circa 1945. Laura the free spirit: I had never thought of her this way. I knew [...]
Now that everyone knows our Portland secrets I suppose it’s not a surprise that I almost never going out in public without running into someone I know. For me, it started when I’d been here for six months.
It was a hopeful sign of family Sunday mornings to come: mornings filled with many kinds of stinky fish; mornings of love.