I am at heart an optimist. I was reading books about faith and ethics while I was still a child of ten, looking to find my way toward goodness. I was taught and believed and still believe that goodness matters, that what we call goodness is something to pursue and to praise.
When we’d been together a few years, people frequently asked us how we’d managed to stick together. It seemed odd at the time. Three or four years is not long enough to prove permanence, it seemed to me. It feels odder now that no one asks us how we managed to stay together—we were only asked that back in the early 1970s.
This morning, I read a column, “Dividing assets in your will can split siblings. Here’s how.” at The Washington Post, about the damage that can result when a parent favors some child or children over others or cuts a child from their will, especially without explanation. Aside from permanent rifts that can result between siblings, there is also the lingering unresolved hurt. A comment from an attorney reports that his experience is that giving more to dysfunctional [addicted, mentally ill] children is common. However unrealistic, many parents hope to equalize situations that are out of their control by gifting one child more than the other in life or in their wills. Some felt permanently injured by fathers who seemed to have abandoned them in favor of a second family. Some inheritors in control have corrected an imbalance as best they could. There were a lot of issues.
I could relate.
Continue readingArctostaphylos ura-usi is the scientific name of kinnikinnic, an evergreen trailing plant related to the broad-leaf evergreen tree we called “madrona” when I was a girl, Arbutus menziesii, and more distantly to Gualtheria shallon, salal. Kinnikkinnik is found across North American and was smoked, though that’s not something I’ve ever tried. The name kinnikinnik, derived from the Unami Delaware /kələkːəˈnikːan. is enough to make me fond of that plant; I recall climbing a madrona when I was no more than five and tearing open a plastic packet of soy sauce to rub on the smooth red skin where the papery bark had already flaked away; and this morning, I picked and ate what are nearly the last of the salal berries on my way off the beach from a long run this morning.
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