This was the result of my mother’s decision to get a puppy like a couple of months after I was born. It was a good decision, I think. We were very good friends.

Here she is, adjusting to the idea of additional house mates. She was very good about it.

Here she is in the last months of her life. We kept going for walks until the end. I still dream about her sometimes.

My mother’s mother died suddenly in a car accident when I was – three or four years old? She and my mother were angry with one another at the time. I never really knew her, but the two or three memories I have are good ones. Kathrin knew her better. Tell the people you love that you love them, because you never know when they’re going to be gone.

Based on what I know of her, second hand – I’m sometimes absolutely stone cold furious with her. But at other times I – I wish she was here, and I wish I could have a conversation with her. For all the ways that she was flawed, I think maybe she would have understood.

I have never seen a photo of my mother’s father. But I know he played the upright bass, I know that he was an engineer, and I know that he kept bees.

My dad with his parents at my parents’ wedding day.

Jay was a trip, with a lot of faults. I only remember him as a quirkey, frail old man. He was There enough to understand when my dad said “I forgive you.”

Reba (Miller) was a sweetheart, and all of the stories of my dad’s grandparents on her side suggest that she came by that honestly. I see a lot of her in my dad.

She kept diaries for her entire life. She has something like 11 grandchildren, but for some reason I inherited all of them. Someday, I will feel ready to read them.

The first time I was in the same room as death. I think I was thirteen? He was hit by a car, which is a thing that happens, here. I think I might even have heard the tires screech at the end of the road. We found him in bad shape under the porch, and did what we could for him. I remember this cat for the friendliness and cuddles and the crazy manic energy and just a faint spark of sass.

I love cats.

Death isn’t half as scary as some of the horrors within and betwixt and between human beings, and the finite-ness of life is just another reason do what we can in the time that we’ve got.

I’m reading a book about the last time Frank sat with his friends before he was put to death by hemlock poisoning. Frank & co. spent that time philosophizing and trying to prove the immortality of the soul, which they never quite managed to pull off. When Frank couldn’t successfully prove that souls were immortal, his friends were deeply troubled and uncomfortable – not just with the prospect of their friend dying, but with a sudden lack of faith in the power of logic and reason and philosophical argument in the first place.

Having to write a five page analytical essay about Frank’s response to this on All Hallow’s Eve has been unexpectedly therapeutic.

Happy Halloween, witches.🖤🍂🕸