-
Being a Widow, Facebook, Friendship, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Rites of passage, Rituals, Social Media, Themes of childhood, Valentines Day, widowed
the write stuff … for valentine’s day
I have conducted many of the most significant relationships in my life almost entirely by telephone. 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. There is always something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Once upon a time, before WhatsApp and Facebook, there were long-distance phone calls with my mother. We would schedule these for odd hours during weekends when we could be less circumspect about the time difference and the cost per minute. There were also sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of…
-
How Close to the Edge We Are
In 2005, I read Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical thinking.” I didn’t get it. Not really. Didion’s personal tragedy was so far removed from my own life at the time shimmering with promise. My husband was still alive, and our little girl had just started the 3rd grade. Some years later, I reread the book. This time, I got it. By then, I had been shattered by a breast cancer diagnosis. Newly widowed and overwhelmed by a grief for which there are still no adequate words, I too lived a year of “magical thinking,” persisting with little rituals and obsessions, pretensions that, together, helped me move forward to an uncertain…
-
Hope Springs
Dangerous pavements… But this year I face the ice with my father’s stick~ Seamus Heaney We’re a quarter of the way through a new century, and if the past is prologue, 2025 will continue to surprise us in ways that nobody will have predicted. Expect the unexpected, and hold on to hope because hope, my friends, is good for us. Hope can change our lives. Dr. Shane Lopez, senior scientist at Gallup, defines hope as the belief that the future will be better than the present, along with the belief that you have the power to make it so. Hope might feel a little naïve, maybe a little like denial in tumultuous times…
-
a dream of solstice
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) 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 reassurance that the light is coming. Solstice is derived from the Latin, sōlstitium, loosely translated as the apparent standing still of the sun. To ancient civilizations, it looked like the sun stood still at that moment when its rays shine directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, 23…
