In vile confirmation of all my worst fears, I seem to find myself, once again, in purgatory. This is not a metaphor. It is a whole truth that spans eons and stops only when the very basic parts of the thing start to break down. The cell walls of all involved would have to crack and spill their atoms and protons and neurons all over the floorboards in order to erase the truth of what I'm about to tell you. So bare with me as I relate to you this horror story with the fear and reverence it deserves, lest I shatter anymore bones, lest I pop my other Achilles' heel, for contrary to popular belief, pain and purgatory are not mutually exclusive. In fact, pain is increased seven-hundred fold in the land between. The moment of inception repeats over and over again, stuck mercilessly in a groove. Imagine stubbing your toe every five seconds for a billion years. Imagine drowning one-hundred times a day, forever. Imagine that while you listen to my tale.
I was sitting in my room in a large decorative chair that I bought for twenty-five dollars at the Salvation Army. When you enter my room, the smell is familiar. It smells of burnt corn tortilla shells and floral perfume. It smells of a leaky gas oven and of cigarette smoke, and occasionally of sex, cat hair, and basement. This conglomerate of smells gives it a sort of character. It's not the kind of place you'd want to spend any significant amount of time in due to its low ceiling and its oppressive, postage-stamp size. Sad that we found it charming once. Like a tomb of ancient Egypt it is stocked floor to oppressive ceiling, with cheap, worthless belongings. Neglect coats them in much the way that a greasy head leaning against a train window coats the glass with oil and sebum. In some cultures the objects inhabiting this room would be burnt for fuel or used to test catapults. The chair for example. The chair is a monstrosity. Probably liberated from a funeral home or the lobby of a motel or gentleman's club, half of its weight is most likey sweat and dust mites alone. And that was before the blood.
In it I sat, smoking a cigarette, blowing my exhale past the African Violets and out the window. That's where I was the night I got my last visit from Saint Peter. I can't exactly say I was happy to see him, or him me. Contrary to popular belief, Saint Peter isn't a kindly old man in a white robe with a ledger, he usually wears a black suit spotted with suspicious stains. His nose looks as if it has been broken several times over, and his skin is all leathery and scared. Still, he has a kind of animallistic charm that makes my heart flutter ever so slightly in it's ribby cage when he shows up in my room. This, in turn, makes my breasts swell and all the other pertinent parts of me light up like a ping-pong machine after a perfectly deployed ball. Sometimes we make love. He likes to talk dirty. But tonight he came by to snap my Achilles' tendon and send me to purgatory.
I knew it was coming. Usually, when acts of such intentional violence are coming at you with a scythe, you can narrow them down to a specific set of circumstances that put the whole bloody thing into motion. I was thinking about my transgressions as he leaned into me and reached down, grabbed me between the legs, and lifted my whole body onto the bed. For a second I thought he might want to be intimate, but with one quick move he grabbed my right leg out of its sock monkey slipper, hugged it to his chest and with a small, curved, silver blade, pressed with all his might against the rubbery tendon. I felt it sever and snap, and blacked out immediately from the pain. When I woke up he would be gone.
Bobo roused me what must have been just a few minutes later, because I was still bleeding profusely. He was doing his best to wrap my foot with paper towels, but without opposeable thumbs he's pretty much useless when it comes to first aid. His white fur was soaked with blood and the mother in me was immediately worried. What if Saint Peter had hurt him after I passed out.
"Monkey, are you okay?" I gasped through the most intense pain I have ever felt.
"I'm fine. Jesus. Why didn't you call me?"
"You're a cat. You never come when I call."
"Yes, not usually, because all you want to do is fuss over me. When it's important I know." He shook the bloody paper towel from his paw and wiped it on the bed. "This is madness, you know that right?"
"Maybe you should go get help. I'll be okay."
"Go where exactly?"
"I don't know, Giselle's house. Remember that time I sent you over to help her change that light bulb?"
Bobo rolled his eyes, jumped down off the bed, and pulled back the curtains using the top of his head.
"We're not in Echo Park anymore, ma."
I lifted my head and looked out the window. He was right. We weren't in Echo Park anymore. We were somewhere else. We were in a place that over the past few weeks Bobo and I have dubbed "Limbo."
"It looks like a Salvador Dail painting out there," I said, but I was just being pretentious. It looked more like Palm Springs. Or Mars.
Bobo jumped down and started pacing, leaving little bloody foot prints on the floor. I was going to tell him to watch the rug, but what did it matter now? The bed and the chair were soaked through and the pain in my leg was starting to send me off again into the soothing nothingness of the unconscious.
"Don't you pass out on me," Bobo snapped, "you know I can't open those cans myself."
"I'm bleeding to death and all you can think about is your stomach?"
He jumped up onto the kitchen counter.
"I can't turn the faucet on either and I'll be damned if I have to drink from that bowl, I swear to..."
He got all quiet for a moment.
"Are you thirsty?"
"I wasn't. I was just proving a point. But now that I'm up here... Yes. Sorta."
"I'm sorry, kid."
"Well, you should be. I knew you shouldn't have gotten mixed up with that guy. He was bad news from the start. You had me fixed when I was a kitten, maybe you should have taken some of your own genius advice and tied that mess up before it was too late."
"I didn't declaw you."
"If you had, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"We've never had a conversation. You're a cat. I'm assuming this is all a pain related hallucination."
He jumped down from the kitchen counter like a flash, up onto the bed, and perched on my chest.
"Listen to me and listen good. I'm all you got right now and I think we can get out of this but I need you to do exactly as I say, okay?"
"Sure."
"Don't be sarcastic."
"Yes. Sure. Okay," I said with enough conviction to get him off my case. "Why don't you ever sleep on my lap like a normal cat?"
"You smell weird."
"Fair enough."
"Now get your laptop out. I need you to set the cursor on scroll so I can go through all the emails you exchanged with Saint Peter just by pressing my paw on the mouse."
"You can read?"
"Just do it. Then do your best to wrap that foot as tight as you can. We're gonna have to leave here eventually and I need you mobile."
I did as I was told. I assumed without saying that the pain had caused my personality to split in two. The rational leader in me had taken refuge away from the pain and manifested itself in my cat Bobo, while the passive part of me stayed put and took orders. It sort of made sense. Now if I could only figure out why the sky outside was dripping purple, I would be one step closer to figuring a way out of this.
Bobo stared at the screen, pressing his little paw down every few seconds as months of emails with Saintpeter_101 went scrolling by.
"People amaze me," he mused as I carefully wrapped my foot, "he told you who he was. He told you what he would do to you if you told, but you did anyway. Why?"
"Um, I don't know Bobo, because there is no Angel of Death and cat's can't talk, maybe?"
"Maybe. He says here, that if you ever tell anyone what you know about him he will 'come to your house, hobble you,' which I assume is what has happened here, 'and throw you into the land between, which is neither death or living, just a sock hanging on a clothes line in the unfathomable infinite.'"
"I thought he was putting me on."
"How about when he says, 'this is real. I'm not putting you on. You don't know how lonely it can get being immortal, I have a hard time finding someone I can trust,' etc, etc, how about that?"
"Whatever. Now what?"
"Well, it's his realm and I don't think you can die... we have to go find him and you have to beg for forgiveness."
"He practically cut my foot off! And I have to beg forgiveness?"
Just then the walls started to shake and rattle like an earthquake. Glass began to break and plaster to crumble.
"Come on, we have to get out of here!"
Bobo lept out the bathroom window just as it collapsed in a pile of rubble. I dragged myself to the door and hopped up on my good leg to open it. The rush of blood to my foot sent my head reeling and I almost passed out again.
"Come on, mom! You can do it!" I looked out the glass panel in the door to see Bobo sitting on his hind legs waving me over. He looked so cute I wanted to wear his little face as a hat, so I reached my arm through the broken glass and opened the door from the outside, swinging my body around and hopping 10 or so feet to safety. I looked back and saw my room standing crypt-like sans the house it once was part of. It was being demolished by huge yellow trucks being operated by little girls in party dresses. One of them saw Bobo and approached with eager trepidation.
"Is he friendly," the little girl asked?
Bobo instinctively rolled onto his back, a move which seemed vulgar now that he could talk. The little girl took his cue and rubbed him to the point of purring.
"What's her name?"
"Bobo. He's a boy. Why are you and your friends destroying my house?"
"Uncle Peter told us to," Bobo was drooling now, off somewhere in kitty euphoria, the girl's words were lost on him. "And we need more stuff to test the catapult."
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Love Poem
I found my perfect lover, but there's something you should know.
He beats me every morning, and fills my boots with snow.
He locks me in the woodshed, rubs thistles in my hair,
He strips me of my garments, and leaves me naked bare.
He ties me to the bed post, feeds my dinner to the cat,
He tells me filthy stories, of an Irishman called Pat.
He's not what you'd call handsome, he's ugly as a stump.
But he holds me in the night, curled up heavy on my rump.
I found my perfect lover, this I know is true,
I found my perfect lover, O my lover, it is you.
He beats me every morning, and fills my boots with snow.
He locks me in the woodshed, rubs thistles in my hair,
He strips me of my garments, and leaves me naked bare.
He ties me to the bed post, feeds my dinner to the cat,
He tells me filthy stories, of an Irishman called Pat.
He's not what you'd call handsome, he's ugly as a stump.
But he holds me in the night, curled up heavy on my rump.
I found my perfect lover, this I know is true,
I found my perfect lover, O my lover, it is you.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles...
Fucking ellipses...
Happy daylight savings time to all, here and abroad. What does it mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means I have an hour to write to you before my regularly scheduled bedtime of 5am-ish. It's only 4 right now and until I'm used to it, I can kick back and enjoy the fall back in time. I don't like to diary-blog. It's boring, so I hardly ever do it. My brain moves faster then my fingers and I tend to just kind of toss my thoughts in a lumpy pile. That's an odd confession for a self-proclaimed writer, isn't it? To admit the fact that I don't write that often is sad, but I don't. Anymore. I remember a time when I would stay up all night perving around in the lizard brain like a scavenger in a junk yard, picking things from dirty piles and rearranging them to suit my needs. To decorate my cardboard box, or whatever project I happened to be working on at the moment, but not anymore. I dread The Stack, you see.
Under my broken TV with the disconnected cable box, behind the pile of random DVDs, and give-away CDs, a hole punch, and a ceramic cat, lies "The Stack". It's a wretched collection of pages about 20 inches in height. It is, give or take, everything I have ever written. I can't honestly say it's collecting dust, because dust doesn't really get back there. It's beyond the reach of dust, in a kind of vacuum.
I was at Target today PMSing my tits off. My body was coursing with organic chemicals, nasty, malevolent, baby making chemicals, that had me in the toy isle pawing at little girls Halloween costumes and holding back tears at the thought of my wasted eggs. May wasted chances to spawn and breed something that would look cute dressed as Snow White. I was a salmon, all of a sudden, fighting my way up stream. Past an isle of Transformers to the dreaded Barbie Dolls. I stood glass-eyed staring at their painted faces hermetically sealed behind plastic in their pretty dresses and thought to myself -- Fuck. Dust. Dust can't in. And then -- it's as if I were fisted in the uterus by the lubed up hand of fate. Something about action and character hit me all of a sudden. And how actions strung together make up character. What a sap I had been. Afraid of a stack? Bah! I needed to DO something.
I high tailed it to the electronics section an asked a borderline comatose sales clerk to point me in the direction of the vacuum sealers. After a series of confusing dead ends, and a bottle of shoplifted children's Triaminic in grape flavor to dull the edges, I was in the housewares section loading the very last vacuum sealer into my cart. It was made to seal meats and things for freezing, which conjured images I like -- one of my favorite words is "bounty" followed shortly by "pantry". It also reminded me that it was time to defrost my own freezer. As I skipped to the checkout I tried to remember what exactly was frozen in the block of ice hovering above my fridge. Maybe I could compose a 140 character pun about it on the ride home to post on Twitter, maybe. But for now I had more important fish to fry and when I was done with my new project the fridge itself might not even be necessary. So I got in the car and drove home.
I opened the fridge. I wanted the melted ice of the freezer to drip onto the floor and ruin things. I wanted to cook up the Trader Joe's vegetarian ribs that I knew were in there and see how they tasted after a year frozen in ice. But first I wanted to hermetically seal The Stack section by section and sail them one by one down the LA river.
It took me a while to figure out how to use the sealer, but once I got the hang of it the whole process was a breeze. I sealed whole feature scripts, nine of them. Ten short stories at a time. Plays in twos. Novels, in threes and fours. I went through drawers to make sure I wasn't missing anything, letters, postcards. I even sealed some books that I had made copious notes in, just so I wouldn't miss a word. And when I was done, I looked at them, all laid out on the bed, suffocating. They didn't put up much of a fight. They died the way they had lived, neglected, ignored. By the world? Maybe. By me? Definitely. My children, my babies. Created in a moment of passion, pooped out like dumpster babies at the prom, and stored away in the basement by a cruel mother suffering from Munchhausen's Bi-proxy. For a second I wanted to rip them open, to try and save them, but my second screenplay, The Parlor, being about suicide, had sputtered out early and I didn't think it fair to save some and not others. No, this was genocide on a pan-genre level. I ate the rubbery veggie rib while they all glared at me from under plastic with their contemptuous fonts. "The world won't miss you," I drooled through my tears, two-year-old barbecue sauce drying on my chin like blood. Fucking cannibal.
I cleaned up and decided to catch a movie. The Laemmle in Pasadena was playing a film that starred an ex-lover of mine. "A REAL movie," I told the plastic sheathed corpses as I stuffed them into my trunk alongside a sweaty yoga mat, some laundry bags, and -- fuck! Three copies of Code 98, my stage play about a post-apocalyptic whore house. I went back inside to fire up the sealer one more time...
Twenty minutes later I was standing on the Pasadena bridge flinging them into the inky darkness of the LA River. Plop. Plop. Plop...
The movie was lack lustre. My dead babies were so much better, I thought as I erased my hard drive, killed my e-mail accounts, and uninstalled Final Draft. It's all gone now and I feel, somehow, lighter. Anyways, that's my hour. Over an hour really. Wow, when I get started, let me tell you! I'm gonna have a cigarette now and go to sleep when I wake up I was thinking of getting rid of some more of my stuff starting with the refrigerator. I'll Twitter about it so you guys know what's up! Good night!!
xo,
Adria
Happy daylight savings time to all, here and abroad. What does it mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means I have an hour to write to you before my regularly scheduled bedtime of 5am-ish. It's only 4 right now and until I'm used to it, I can kick back and enjoy the fall back in time. I don't like to diary-blog. It's boring, so I hardly ever do it. My brain moves faster then my fingers and I tend to just kind of toss my thoughts in a lumpy pile. That's an odd confession for a self-proclaimed writer, isn't it? To admit the fact that I don't write that often is sad, but I don't. Anymore. I remember a time when I would stay up all night perving around in the lizard brain like a scavenger in a junk yard, picking things from dirty piles and rearranging them to suit my needs. To decorate my cardboard box, or whatever project I happened to be working on at the moment, but not anymore. I dread The Stack, you see.
Under my broken TV with the disconnected cable box, behind the pile of random DVDs, and give-away CDs, a hole punch, and a ceramic cat, lies "The Stack". It's a wretched collection of pages about 20 inches in height. It is, give or take, everything I have ever written. I can't honestly say it's collecting dust, because dust doesn't really get back there. It's beyond the reach of dust, in a kind of vacuum.
I was at Target today PMSing my tits off. My body was coursing with organic chemicals, nasty, malevolent, baby making chemicals, that had me in the toy isle pawing at little girls Halloween costumes and holding back tears at the thought of my wasted eggs. May wasted chances to spawn and breed something that would look cute dressed as Snow White. I was a salmon, all of a sudden, fighting my way up stream. Past an isle of Transformers to the dreaded Barbie Dolls. I stood glass-eyed staring at their painted faces hermetically sealed behind plastic in their pretty dresses and thought to myself -- Fuck. Dust. Dust can't in. And then -- it's as if I were fisted in the uterus by the lubed up hand of fate. Something about action and character hit me all of a sudden. And how actions strung together make up character. What a sap I had been. Afraid of a stack? Bah! I needed to DO something.
I high tailed it to the electronics section an asked a borderline comatose sales clerk to point me in the direction of the vacuum sealers. After a series of confusing dead ends, and a bottle of shoplifted children's Triaminic in grape flavor to dull the edges, I was in the housewares section loading the very last vacuum sealer into my cart. It was made to seal meats and things for freezing, which conjured images I like -- one of my favorite words is "bounty" followed shortly by "pantry". It also reminded me that it was time to defrost my own freezer. As I skipped to the checkout I tried to remember what exactly was frozen in the block of ice hovering above my fridge. Maybe I could compose a 140 character pun about it on the ride home to post on Twitter, maybe. But for now I had more important fish to fry and when I was done with my new project the fridge itself might not even be necessary. So I got in the car and drove home.
I opened the fridge. I wanted the melted ice of the freezer to drip onto the floor and ruin things. I wanted to cook up the Trader Joe's vegetarian ribs that I knew were in there and see how they tasted after a year frozen in ice. But first I wanted to hermetically seal The Stack section by section and sail them one by one down the LA river.
It took me a while to figure out how to use the sealer, but once I got the hang of it the whole process was a breeze. I sealed whole feature scripts, nine of them. Ten short stories at a time. Plays in twos. Novels, in threes and fours. I went through drawers to make sure I wasn't missing anything, letters, postcards. I even sealed some books that I had made copious notes in, just so I wouldn't miss a word. And when I was done, I looked at them, all laid out on the bed, suffocating. They didn't put up much of a fight. They died the way they had lived, neglected, ignored. By the world? Maybe. By me? Definitely. My children, my babies. Created in a moment of passion, pooped out like dumpster babies at the prom, and stored away in the basement by a cruel mother suffering from Munchhausen's Bi-proxy. For a second I wanted to rip them open, to try and save them, but my second screenplay, The Parlor, being about suicide, had sputtered out early and I didn't think it fair to save some and not others. No, this was genocide on a pan-genre level. I ate the rubbery veggie rib while they all glared at me from under plastic with their contemptuous fonts. "The world won't miss you," I drooled through my tears, two-year-old barbecue sauce drying on my chin like blood. Fucking cannibal.
I cleaned up and decided to catch a movie. The Laemmle in Pasadena was playing a film that starred an ex-lover of mine. "A REAL movie," I told the plastic sheathed corpses as I stuffed them into my trunk alongside a sweaty yoga mat, some laundry bags, and -- fuck! Three copies of Code 98, my stage play about a post-apocalyptic whore house. I went back inside to fire up the sealer one more time...
Twenty minutes later I was standing on the Pasadena bridge flinging them into the inky darkness of the LA River. Plop. Plop. Plop...
The movie was lack lustre. My dead babies were so much better, I thought as I erased my hard drive, killed my e-mail accounts, and uninstalled Final Draft. It's all gone now and I feel, somehow, lighter. Anyways, that's my hour. Over an hour really. Wow, when I get started, let me tell you! I'm gonna have a cigarette now and go to sleep when I wake up I was thinking of getting rid of some more of my stuff starting with the refrigerator. I'll Twitter about it so you guys know what's up! Good night!!
xo,
Adria
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Nonnie
Socrates said that “death may be the greatest of all human blessings.” And while I’m not so sure I agree, it was the one quote I found--after hours of searching the internet--that I could see Nonnie shaking her little hands in agreement to. She was not afraid to die, if anything she had a kind of on-going, one-sided, correspondence with death, as if it were a long lost relative who refused to visit for reasons unknown. The great beyond is never very far away in an Italian household. Jesus, Mary, the Saint’s, and our ancestors are located in various picture frames around the house so they can be accessed directly. And while Nonnie believed in heaven, she had a pretty good feeling it was located on her back porch, on warm summer afternoons, when the setting sun hit the wisteria vines just so and turned everything purple, green, and gold.
One of the most uniquely special things about my grandmother was her poet’s appreciation for the beauty of the world. I can recall so many times driving her to the Big Banana for example, she would point out the green of the trees along Long Beach Road, a street not known primarily for its flora. “Aren’t they beautiful?” She would say. They were, when you took a second to really see them. And of course, more obviously, her garden in all its incarnations, with string beans, tomatoes, zucchini, mint in the summer to go in the Orzata, and the African Violets on the windowsill, the Camellias, the Dahlias, all flourishing to an almost supernatural extreme.
Her beautiful garden was physical example of her capacity to nurture. Her amazing cooking, to nourish. The countless dresses she would sew for me until she was physically unable and even beyond--I would thread her needle the way she did for her grandmother. The home she kept, and the feeling it instilled in all who entered it, a feeling of security, safety, and love. A warm place with good smells. She was mother. She was nature.
The other day at the wake I was sitting alone thinking about how in the world I was going to write a eulogy for Nonnie, a task I have been dreading since she and my mother nominated me for the job a while back. I borrowed a pad and pen and tried in vain to scribble something coherent through my tears. I failed. The only thing that surfaced was the following sentence that I must have written at least ten times.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
Because how do you thank a person who has loved you unconditionally, beyond all measurable bounds of reason since before you can remember? A person who no matter what state of mind they’re in, (half asleep, headaches, dementia,) greets you with the most radiant of smiles the second they see your face. A person who from practically their deathbed wants to fix the drooping hem of your sweater so you look as nice and neat as possible? All we had to do was admire something of hers and she would offer it. Not to spoil or bribe, but for the sheer pleasure of making us smile. I don’t know if I have ever loved that purely, but I feel I am a better, kinder, and stronger person for having received hers.
Nonnie was at her core, a generous woman. She instilled that quality in her children and grandchildren. Brian the teacher, Kevin the protector, Darren and I, the writers and Christopher the healer. Her son who ushers life into the world, her youngest daughter who cares for creatures great and small, and especially in my mother, the caretaker, who gave more of herself then she had to give and was there for the long haul and till the very end. On that night Socrates was right, and death came in the form of a blessing. Under the full February moon, in the arms of her female descendents she stepped from a bodily vessel that had ceased to serve her, and pushed open the screen door onto her back porch, eternal summer, the magic of nature, and the loving embrace of the infinite.
I am grateful to have had her as such a huge part of my life for as long as I did and I will miss her with all my heart. We can honor her memory by passing on the family traditions, the stories, and the recipes, the generosity, and most of all by taking her most poignant piece of advice to heart. “Love yourself,” she would simply say. The longer version, as interpreted by yours truly, “love yourself the way I love you and you won’t be able to settle for anything less then the best.” Thank you, Nonnie. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you forever, and may you rest in peace. Xoxoxo.
One of the most uniquely special things about my grandmother was her poet’s appreciation for the beauty of the world. I can recall so many times driving her to the Big Banana for example, she would point out the green of the trees along Long Beach Road, a street not known primarily for its flora. “Aren’t they beautiful?” She would say. They were, when you took a second to really see them. And of course, more obviously, her garden in all its incarnations, with string beans, tomatoes, zucchini, mint in the summer to go in the Orzata, and the African Violets on the windowsill, the Camellias, the Dahlias, all flourishing to an almost supernatural extreme.
Her beautiful garden was physical example of her capacity to nurture. Her amazing cooking, to nourish. The countless dresses she would sew for me until she was physically unable and even beyond--I would thread her needle the way she did for her grandmother. The home she kept, and the feeling it instilled in all who entered it, a feeling of security, safety, and love. A warm place with good smells. She was mother. She was nature.
The other day at the wake I was sitting alone thinking about how in the world I was going to write a eulogy for Nonnie, a task I have been dreading since she and my mother nominated me for the job a while back. I borrowed a pad and pen and tried in vain to scribble something coherent through my tears. I failed. The only thing that surfaced was the following sentence that I must have written at least ten times.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
Because how do you thank a person who has loved you unconditionally, beyond all measurable bounds of reason since before you can remember? A person who no matter what state of mind they’re in, (half asleep, headaches, dementia,) greets you with the most radiant of smiles the second they see your face. A person who from practically their deathbed wants to fix the drooping hem of your sweater so you look as nice and neat as possible? All we had to do was admire something of hers and she would offer it. Not to spoil or bribe, but for the sheer pleasure of making us smile. I don’t know if I have ever loved that purely, but I feel I am a better, kinder, and stronger person for having received hers.
Nonnie was at her core, a generous woman. She instilled that quality in her children and grandchildren. Brian the teacher, Kevin the protector, Darren and I, the writers and Christopher the healer. Her son who ushers life into the world, her youngest daughter who cares for creatures great and small, and especially in my mother, the caretaker, who gave more of herself then she had to give and was there for the long haul and till the very end. On that night Socrates was right, and death came in the form of a blessing. Under the full February moon, in the arms of her female descendents she stepped from a bodily vessel that had ceased to serve her, and pushed open the screen door onto her back porch, eternal summer, the magic of nature, and the loving embrace of the infinite.
I am grateful to have had her as such a huge part of my life for as long as I did and I will miss her with all my heart. We can honor her memory by passing on the family traditions, the stories, and the recipes, the generosity, and most of all by taking her most poignant piece of advice to heart. “Love yourself,” she would simply say. The longer version, as interpreted by yours truly, “love yourself the way I love you and you won’t be able to settle for anything less then the best.” Thank you, Nonnie. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you forever, and may you rest in peace. Xoxoxo.
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