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Being a Widow, Facebook, Friendship, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Rites of passage, Rituals, Social Media, Themes of childhood, Valentines Day, widowed
love love letters ~ happy valentine’s day.
Many relationships in my life, I conduct almost entirely by telephone, including those with the people dearest to me. With so many miles of ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it has been easier to carry on conversations from the comfort of our own homes. I suppose in that regard, it has been business as usual during the pandemic. Always, there is something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Once upon a time, before WhatsApp and Facetime, there were long-distance phone calls with my mother scheduled at odd hours during weekends when we could be less circumspect with the time difference and the cost…
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Arizona, Awesome Women, Immigration, Linda Ronstadt, Memoir, Parkinson's Disease, Politics, SB1070, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of childhood
What would Dr. King do?
‘Only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars’ On the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in 2010, more than twenty thousand of us gathered in Phoenix, Arizona to march from Falcon Park to Sheriff Joe Arpaio‘s ‘Tent City,’ the 7-acre outdoor jail he once described as a “concentration camp” to supporters at his local Italian-American club. A place where, in the summer, temperatures inside could reach up to 130 degrees. (54C), a place where detainees convicted of minor offenses, were subjected to inhumane, humiliating treatment, a place that remained open for almost a quarter of a century. Arpaio was so proud of his prison experiment that he often…
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When the Ancients Speak to Us
Dawn light began stealingThrough the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stonesMillennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is the turning point I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reminder – a reassurance – that the light is coming. I suppose ancient rituals help us keep the faith, not necessarily in a god or in any religious doctrine, that good times lie ahead. In…
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9/11, Awesome Women, cancer, Children's Books, Education, Emmylou Harris, Family, favorite teacher, Love Actually, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Ordinary Things, Pre-school, Soundtracks of our Lives, summer camp, Teaching, Themes of Childhood, Van Morrison, Van Morrison, Women and careers
For my daughter on her birthday . . . the love, actually, is all around.
It’s one of my favorite pictures – her T-shirt reminding me the way she always does, “good things will come.” It is my darling girl’s birthday, and with COVID keeping us in our respective places once again this year, we’ll have to make do with text messages and embarrassing photos on Facebook instead of a celebration here in Mexico. I’m going to wake up missing her and remembering that it’s really hard to remember life before her. Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying; it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing…
