Signing On

I'm back. Back from Christmas with my family in Phoenix, back from being too busy to write, back from being sad 90% of the time. I want to write. I want to be more alive. I have ideas for books and furniture and recipes and hats. I feel a weird hope that things might work out okay.

A couple things to catch up on...here are the bottles I painted for the beer I made. They were less on the creative, abstract side and more on the informative side. But the beer was quite stellar. Also, I think I'm going to buy a tiny little house in Newton, Kansas. It's on the Amtrak line so I could get on in Flagstaff and get off in Newton. They're so flipping cheap back there. Built in 1910, wood floors, nice woodwork. We'll see, but I'm seriously looking. I'll never move from Flagstaff, it ROCKS, but it would be cool to have a great place to write and go to when I need to have a change of scenery. I've got relatives back there. I grew up in Topeka. Okay, also, we're taking both my parents back there this summer and I'll be damned if I'm going to quit taking care of them now. They'll be in Hutchinson which is twelve miles from Newton so I'd be close. Plus, bonus, lightning bugs!!!! I'm a freak.

When my dad died four years ago, I cried for weeks. It wasn't like a sobbing, hysterical thing. It was more like my eyes just leaked continually. I owned a little wine shop back then and I'd wait on people and just cry and they seemed to be fine with it. We'd talk about it and I knew most of them anyway but I just couldn't seem to stop. Now, with my mom, I get sad but I feel calmer about it. I spent months crying in the elevator at The Peaks, the same leaky eye thing, after I'd go spend time with her but since she died, I feel a sense of relief. For her. When I was seventeen, she and my dad sat me down at the kitchen table and made me promise that if either of them were ever hooked up to machines...a vegetable is what they called it, that I needed to pull the plug. But there wasn't any plug to pull for my mom. I was helpless to do what she wanted.

I'm not sure what I believe about Heaven but if there is a place where we get to hang out with the people we knew before, I sure hope she's there with my dad, playing a little gin rummy and eating peanuts.