There's a quote that I like by Anais Nin, "We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospect," and I think that sometimes we write to dilute the harsher flavors that get mixed in throughout the course of our time on earth.
My father passed away Friday. It was an unexpected series of hopeful moments and setbacks over the course of 6 weeks that ended with a drive deep into the countryside of East Tennessee yesterday to bury him next to his mother, an English teacher, and his father, a preacher who traveled the church circuit in thirties and forties.
The past few months have been a whirlwind of life stresses, from my father's sudden illness to the birth of my twins and trying to wrangle them along with a four-year-old while remaining sane (a task I fail daily). This forum has been a haven and an escape, and as I watched soft green hills roll by out the passenger window the other day, I thought I might finally have to throw in the towel and check out for good. I had no words left in me, nor the desire to try to stir them up again. Then I got home, and I sat out on my back porch listening to the crickets chirp and the neighbors swim and I thought about all the stories I've written here, and the ones I still want to write, and even though I'm not very active writing-wise at the moment, I decided I'd like to keep posting the logs of months past as I've been doing. It gives me something to look forward to and reminds me that things carry on.
I'm grateful for this small corner of the internet where I can toss my own flavors, be they bitter or sweet or some amalgam of both, into the mix.
