All Good Things...

... must come to an end. At least for a time anyway. This month marks two years of this here blog; this here post is number 100 - seems like an ending too good to pass up. For now. I stress that because I will be back sometime - can't keep a madwoman from showing her crazy for very long! But we're moving house this summer, which brings a whole host of work that I'd rather not even think about (this will be the tenth move of our almost 23 year marriage; no, we're not a military family - we're just fools!) I'm also gearing up for a month-long hike in September with my Dad - we're going to knock off a section of the Appalachian Trail. In between, I'll be setting everyone up in a new/old town, and getting myself squared away to keep on doing the things I love, which includes putting pen to paper (or words to screen, which isn't nearly as poetic.) I still have novel #2 to put out into the world, as well as my memoir-in-essay, Still Life With Boys, which I've been sharing snippets of here. I've also started novel #3, The Bountylands, a dystopian tale involving family and land and climate disaster which has been a bit too easy to write. All this to say - I won't be gone forever. Just giving myself some space to live and do all the things. So I'll leave you - FOR NOW - with the last few paragraphs of my second novel, Our Own Precious Places. You'll see that my narrator, Viola, understands their isn't much of a difference between staying and going, because a person's choices often keep them rooted to a place for all time. I hear you, old girl, loud and clear.

Nothin’s for sure at my age but I do know this much - each one of us holds our own precious places in this lowly world and in each others’ hearts and thoughts and minds too. I know this to be true. And I know I ain’t no different than any of God’s creatures who need deliverance from the choices they was called to make. I also know God has forgiven me from tryin to rid myself of my child cuz of how much trouble we had with Chester later on. His anger was our cross. We all bore it the best we knowed how.

And if the Most Merciful One could absolve me of that then he’s completely freed me from the chains binding me to Michael. He’s showed me the place where Michael remains. It’s murky and deep and cool and quiet. It’s a rootless spot with no memory for water don’t hold onto the past like we do. Water that used to quench the thirst of many now supports just one. If I have my druthers he’d live there forever. Maybe he will. It’s a far sight better than the places my children live - tangled places of loss and burden and guilt and longin and loneliness and shadows. Only Margaret holds a seat above us all. At the right hand of God - it’s a place that can’t never be stripped away. It’s turrible then that I don’t want her to be there even if it is perfect. I want her here with me and her children and their children to come which only exposes me as a mother of the damnedest sort. Filiz graduates from high school this year and poor Margaret barely got to see her start her schoolin. It just weren’t her time to go.

But now it’s mine. I unnerstand and it’s all right. I always knowed it would come to this in the end. Outside to the old plum tree with its impossible roots grown so deep it couldn’t give itself up even if it wanted to. Not to any old stiff breeze that come along. Neither to rot or slow decay. Sure the tree might die but the roots’ll hold tight still. They won’t budge for nothin. Surely not for an old woman who thinks she needs to square things up before she goes. But I’ve knowed for a long while now that I gotta try.

I owe it to em all. I owe it to this place. I owe it to myself. I didn’t know I was woman enough to withstand it all but my roots kept me right where I was always meant to be.

Here I was and here I will always be. But right now here I am.

Thanks for your support, my friends, and for sharing in the madness these past two years. See you soon(ish)...