11.3.13
Despair is the ultimate sin, and I don’t mean that in a religious way. I mean that once you
despair you are done for. Take a drink, take to chicanery, tell lies, cheat… all active living
things, whereas despair means giving up, it means death.
I have fended off the spare many times, evaded it’s noose. I shall continue to for all my time. I
will set an example for my girls to follow.
Mac said to me the other day when a girl at the store upset her when she made an effort to
make friends. (Mac really had her feelings hurt) I told her of the millions of times I had been
hurt- but she said: “But mama, you are always happy and smiling” I told her how your skin
toughens up with age and you learn to shirk off the mean people and focus on the positive.

When a facade breaks there is rubble; and the better and more elaborate the facade, the more
rubble there is. For facades take work, and beget hopeless belief over disbelief. The crumbling
can be hidden at first, but eventually, the most ornate of facades will tumble.. leaving its
architect shattered somewhere in the rubble.
11.2.13

10.31.13
There’s a healing virtue to soil. It accepts the most revolting things and by some miracle
transforms them in two lovely flowers of trees, crops, flowers most ornate. The soil even takes
on the most blackened of souls, and hold them fixed. Keeping their victims safe, like a buffer
allowing for time to take precedence. The soil has nothing but time.

Life Demands a rational approach. But the last thing men and women will be is rational. They’ll
be martyrs, saintly or devils, brave or cowardly, intelligent or stupid, but rational? No.
Modern verbiage calls them mixed families. Old fashioned hearts decree it dovetailing. Whatever
metaphor likens to mind, there must be plenty of love to go around. If I only had one apple and
four children, I would quarter it equally and dole it out just so… regardless if they came into my
heart via womb or marriage.
It’s times like these I am embarrassed by my own inability to weep. I feel grief in my mind, a
constriction in my chest, even a hard painful lump in my throat, but the release of tears of
denied me. Years of not daring to cry, telling myself feared played said if I once gave way, I’d be
done for and never stop.
Enough of tragedy on the news. Of evil step parents and their views. I just happen to know that
if it were me in that place, they have to come through me to abuse anyone of my children.
2013

So it’s not that drug this time, but some drug is always getting abused. Used for all the wrong
reasons, like an ill-fated Voyage, she’s lost at sea. And then there’s me, the soft landing, the
one who played succor to her misdeeds.

I remember…
I remember, as a very little girl, maybe three or four, lying on a blanket in the backyard where I’d
been put down to take a nap. Instead I was watching my mother hang sheets on the line. My
mom must have been about 27 then, long and graceful and shapely. The sun, as I remembered,
was behind her, and would cast her dark outline on each white sheet and she pinned it up. Her
head, upraised arms and elbows in silhouette, her hips and waist below the sheet, she would
rise on her painted toes each time she attached a clothespin. It was like watching a shadow
play. As I lay there sleepily watching, I saw her pass along the line of hanging sheets, setting
poles between the sheets to prop up the lines… sometimes as a shadow, sometimes as my
mother. The brevity of the moments between the sheets, when she was there glancing at me,
her real self, made them startling and filled me with love. There she was and then a few
seconds later there she was again.. much to my delight.

There are only two days in one’s lifetime that nothing can be done… yesterday and tomorrow… Today is for love, compassion, joy, understanding and general unmitigated enthusiasm. We must embrace the moment as much as our brains and bodies will allow. We must keep things in proportion.