Gary caught me working on this and when I told him it was a new blog post, he said, “Finally!” I had “resolutions” for 2024. Some of those plans fell apart and some went better than I dared hope and shifted my goals. Toward the end of the year I began making plans for 2025. Those have shifted too.
Continue readingMy husband and I used to vote in person. After work, Gary and I would drive the curving Highway 101 north in the dark, six miles to the Chamber of Commerce or the City Hall or the Presbyterian church in Cannon Beach to vote. The location varied, the poll workers did not. Older women always worked the polls. We did this in the evening after my husband finished work in Tillamook County, which meant we arrived at the polling station just before eight, near the end of the day.
The conversation turned to Kurt Cobain, and someone claimed Cobain’s wife killed him like a “typical woman” does. He said it at least twice. Beside me, my husband says he thought, uh-oh.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The deadliest place for women is at home and 140 women and girls on average were killed by an intimate partner or family member per day last year, two U.N. agencies reported Monday.
Globally, an intimate partner or family member was responsible for the deaths of approximately 51,100 women and girls during 2023, an increase from an estimated 48,800 victims in 2022, UN Women and the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said. …
By contrast, the vast majority of male homicides take place outside homes and families, it said.
But set aside murder for a moment and consider that the comment by my friend suggests that women’s typical behavior is murderous when angry, that unlike men, this cruelty(?) or destructive tendency(?) is uniquely or particularly female. That it’s typical. Well.
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I was asked what I write. The answer is complicated.
There has been plenty to write about and I have been getting some of it down, typing away at my computer.
Continue readingConsider this post my attempt to park the bike and watch the water.
I am nearly two thirds through NaNo month, and I have logged 100k words on the site. This was my 7th NaNo reaching fifty thousand words. I have written entire novels of 75k during NaNo in past years, usually beginning with a short story and then forging on.
And now. The election. I do care. I do believe I have a duty of care not only toward myself but toward others. I want to make clear that the only people I blame are the Americans who believe that in order to win, “Other people” must lose…
.
I took off all my rings and refused to leave my bed. I worked on revising for NaNo with a kind of despair; read Virginia’s Apple, found delight; waited for Gary while he did errands alone because I had been too depressed to leave my bed; and read a friend’s blog that reminded me I needed to do something,.
Continue readingMany things have happened that got in the way of blogging, but the gist is: Facebook, a minor medical issue that got complicated (not mine and mostly okay now), and developmental editing of my novel. Reading. And now NaNo.
I am told I should explain about NaNo. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is November. It is online, motivational (for me), free, as private or public as you want it to be, and I’ve done it before a few times. Each morning this month, I write on my laptop—the laptop I am using to write this long-overdue post—and then I post my progress on the NaNoWriMo website.
Gary waits quietly in the other room.
Continue readingI 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.
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 