Little Orphan Laurie

No matter how old you are when it happens, when your parents are both gone you are an orphan. You have lost the two people whom you have known your entire life. The relationship between parent and child is very intimate. After all they have dealt with you through every thing -- poop, vomit, blood, tears, illnesses, accidents, dreams, failures, Christmases, birthdays -- far more than anyone else in your life. When they are gone there is a huge hole that they used to fill.

A week ago I passed the anniversary of my mother's passing. It was just two years ago and I still mourn her loss. This year it was punctuated by the loss of Lauren Bacall, Robin Williams, and the father of a friend. All the old feelings came back and I was laid low with a deep depression.

You don't "get over" the passing of a parent. The grief lessens with time and you learn to deal with the loss. You find things to help fill the hole. But it never totally goes away. I think that is why people have  created such elaborate death rituals over the centuries. It is not just to send off the one lost from the tribe, it is more of an acknowledgement of the enormous change that is happening in ourselves with adjusting to their loss.

I was talking with my friend and next door neighbor who helped me through my loss and I voiced that I was still realizing that in the last few years I was holding myself together and doing for Mom. Now I need to rediscover all of that energy that has had no place to go, turn it around, and use that energy for myself and the future I want to create for myself.

I made one last promise to my mother -- that I would finish my book and get it published. That is not just her dream, it is mine. In spare moments here and there I have been rewriting and editing. Now I need to take all of that time and energy I used in caring for her and put it in to finishing my book. When I tell people about it they want to buy it and read it so it may very well be the avenue to the future I want to build for me.

Mission identified and accepted.

Shirley You Jest!

As I have mentioned in another post, my mother passed away last year. Her name was Shirley. In the last couple of years before she passed I managed to uncover some of the history behind her name.

The basic meaning of her name is "from Shirley, England." Boooooorrrrrrrrring! Oh, but there is so much more to this story than that. To get a bit more concrete than that, it is supposed to mean "bright glade" or "place of hope." Shirley was originally a man's name and a surname.

Mum always struggled to be hopeful in the face of some pretty tall odds - two failed marriages, lifelong health issues, rape, a baby out of wedlock, and dealing with me and my issues. She tried to live up to the name given to her.

Mum loved literature, dabbled with being a writer, a dream that she passed along to me. I think it was in the genes. I don't remember her doing much writing when I was little, but I grew up in a household lined with hundreds of books. Mum, Dad, and I were all avid readers.

She was pleased when I discovered the history behind how she came to be named Shirley. Back in 1849 Charlotte Bronte (author of Jane Eyre) published a book entitled "Shirley." Going against convention, Bronte had given her strong female character a man's name. While the book is all but forgotten by most people these days, it was a best seller back then and forever changed the gender association of the name.
Lovers of the book began to name their girls Shirley instead of their boys.

The association between my mother and the literary Shirley does not stop there. The Shirley in the book is concerned for the poor and the working class during an economic depression following the end of the Napoleonic wars. She becomes involved, after a fashion, in the dealings of labor and the rights of workers. My Shirley, after her divorce from my father and return to the workforce, became first a union steward and later the president of her union's local.

Mum was impressed with the likeness and I gave her a copy of the book for Christmas a couple of years ago. I don't think she ever had the chance to read it. It now sits in my stack of books to be read. I will one day get to it and remember Mum with every word.

In a twist of fate she named her daughter (me) with a name that also used to be a man's name. If you don't believe me, go back and read Little Women. Back in the day Laurie was short for Laurence.

Her name also became a part of one of the most famous running jokes in any movie. In the movie Airplane people say to Leslie Nielsen's character "surely you jest!" He would look at them with a deadpan face and reply, "No. And please don't call me Shirley." Leslie is another name that is slowly making the transition from male to female.

Remembering Mom

It was one year ago today that my mother passed away. It should come as no surprise that I spent the day depressed and alone except for the cat. It should also come as no surprise that I still miss her deeply.

Mom was a bit flaky at times but I think that was part of her being a creative soul that had to spend most of her life struggling to deal with the mundane of everyday survival. She wanted to paint, write, design, and play music. She also wanted to save the world. This didn't always make her the best mother, but she tried her best at that.

I probably didn't make the job of parenting any easier in some ways. I was never one to follow orders without question. I have a stubborn streak in me that she always blamed on my father. In her later years I realized that this stubbornness came from her as well. This is important to note because way too many people asked me how I "let" her do certain things. I frequently had to point out that she was a grown woman with a mind of her own and could make choices.

One of the things I miss most is that she was the biggest fan of my writing and had supported me emotionally through my years of struggling to become published. She has acted as coach and editor on occasion. This was in stark contrast to my dad trying to shut down any dreams I ever had. Perhaps the support from her was even due, in part, to this negativity from my father.

She was a bit narcissistic. According to a therapist I once saw, both of my parents were narcissists. This made my life about them in their eyes. This explains my father's constant criticism and Mom's desire to have me at her beck and call to do things for her. My father and stepmother were always bad mouthing my mother with the certainty that she would turn me into her handmaiden -- which infuriated m

e to no end because I could see this and stood up for myself very well. The flip side is that they wanted me to follow their instruction without question. It was like the real issue was that they wanted me to be their doormat not hers. I prefer not being a doormat at all.

Despite all of this Mom and I developed a deep friendship that went beyond just being mother and daughter. We argued frequently, but also went to the movies, out to dinner, to museums, and even amusement parks together. We talked often. We shared a strong spiritual belief that, though we were Christian, would probably be better described as pantheist. We adopted lonely souls into our family when they needed it.

For months after she went "home" I would come across something that made me want to pick up the phone to call and talk with her. Some funny story, something cute an animal did, or something outrageous on the political scene.

I am someone that few people want to look past the exterior to truly see. She saw me on the inside and was proud of all that I had overcome and accomplished in this life. My stepmother, on the other hand, focuses more on my physical appearance rather than whether or not I am a decent human being. There is no doubt that I need to lose weight, but there is so much more to me than that. It was vital to me to have support for all of me.

Mom was not your average mother. Since I was not your average child, this was a very good thing. No wonder we didn't have the average mother/daughter relationship. No wonder I miss her so much!

Quilts -- A Writer's Love

When I was a little girl my family would make an annual trek to Minnesota to visit family. The change in altitude and humidity usually laid me low for a couple of days, but when I was about four I did actually get sick enough to be put to bed in my grandmother's house.

I lay all alone under the sloping room of the spare room with nothing to do and did not feel at all like sleeping. My eyes strayed across the patchwork quilt. All of the different patterns and colors caught my eye. I started out picking and choosing my favorites.

From there I began making up stories for the different patterns -- which ones came from dresses, which ones from house coats or aprons, a blouse, a shirt -- whatever. Chances are that my mother set me off on this path or I wouldn't have known that quilt fabrics had a previous incarnation. Still, I liked to think that the purple floral print had once been Grandma's favorite summer frock.

It helped me pass the time when I would rather have been outside looking at the hollyhocks in the garden or taking a walk down to the lake with Grandpa -- or my favorite past-time -- "bumping" down the stairs. This was sitting on the top step and proceeding to descend by bouncing down on my butt.

Perhaps this was the start of my fascination for writing and storytelling, but I kind of think I was born hard-wired with the gene for that kind of self-punishment.

After many years that quilt is now mine. It is very old and the fabric is rotting in a few places, but it is still beautiful. I know that it was carefully hand-stitched by my great-grandmother. The pattern is Grandmother's Flower Garden. To me ir represents a history of the women in our family -- a long line of very strong people.

I also know now that much of the material was purchased rather than saved from clothing, though some is.

When my mother passed away and I was going through the many things that my mother had saved from the family I knew that I could not keep much. So I chose to keep those few things that meant the most to me. I kept the quilt and the china-faced doll, and a ceramic collie that my mother had been given as a teen for dog-sitting. Most of what I kept from my mother is the love of writing -- and a disc she left behind with the manuscript of the book she had been writing. Something left for me to finish.

Orphans -- The Story of Us

The hard truth of life is that almost all of us will become orphans. I'm not talking about little children wandering the streets looking for someone to take them in. I'm talking about us -- all of us.

Except for those few who will die before one or both parent, the majority of us will end up as orphans.

Okay, that is kind of a strange thought for me to throw out there, but there it is. We all will end up alone. For those of us who have not had good relationships with our parents this may be no real big deal. If your parents were horrible and abusive this may even seem like good news.

For most of us this will be a gut-wrenching realization. No mommy, no daddy. It is not about who is going to take care of us now in the physical sense. It is a level of emotional support that is suddenly missing from our lives.

For the last couple of years of her life I had to do quite a bit to help Mom keep going. I would buy her groceries every week and would put most of them away. I would take her to doctor's appointments. Most of all I would listen. She was trying to write a book of her life during the Depression and so she was moved to tell me all sorts of stories that were cropping up because of that.

I can't really tell you what many of the stories were about because she was easily drawn off-topic into tangential areas. This happened often enough that I sometimes didn't bother to try to follow the story, but would let her ramble through the past. I usually did these conversations by phone so that I could take care of stuff on the computer, chop vegetables, or go through the mail.

We were best friends as well. She was also the biggest fan of my writing. So when she passed away it left a huge hole in my life. My father had passed 13 years previously so there was nowhere else to really turn. I am an orphan.

I do still have my step-mother, but, as Cinderella taught us, that is not always the best option. Though she is a kind-hearted woman, she is not the best at communicating that -- or many other things. She is rather judgmental and not afraid to voice those thoughts. Based on what my father would tell her about my mother, she could not stand my mother and would tell me as often as possible. For example, she once told me that my mother had never wanted me. I knew the truth behind the statement that she undoubtedly did not and ignored it. So this is not a place to find the support I am now missing.

When my mother passed away my step-mother first said that she wouldn't help me clean out her old apartment, but next thing I knew, there she was helping out. Perhaps her curiosity got the better of her, but I really appreciated her help (and that of her current husband). At one point she was trying to be supportive (in her way) and she started to congratulate me on no longer having my mother. It was coming out wrong and she stopped herself, but I knew where she was going. She wanted to acknowledge that the positive side of this situation was that I would no longer need to spend so much time taking care of my mother.

My step-siblings are a great source of support. They are better and communication than their mother, and have not placed judgment on my mother or my relationship with her. The possible exception to this is my step-sister who had had the opportunity to get to know my mother a little bit before my father and stepmother ever met. So she knows my mother was a good woman with a kind heart.

I also have some great friends who are a huge source of support. Wonderful as they are, there is just no one who can REALLY take the place of your parents in your life. Your parents have been around in one way or another all of your life. They taught you all the basics to get going in life -- you know, all that walking and talking business. You were a hero to them when you started using the potty on your own.

All of that history is exactly that now -- history. There are no future chapters to be written unless Mom or Dad start haunting the house. Now when I really want my mommy I can't even pick up the phone.

The time has really come when "You can't go home again."

Never Forget -- Memories of the Holocaust

Last night I was watching yet another documentary of survivors remembering their experiences during the Holocaust. I know that there are people who are tired of the subject and others who don't believe that it ever happened.

Trust me, it happened. How do I know? Because I am one of the other kind of Holocaust "survivor."

Say WHAT?

You read me. I am a Holocaust survivor. Okay, technically I died in the mud of a prison camp in Poland. I was then reincarnated into this life time. I am not alone. There are many of us out here around the world. Okay, to understand my story, it helps if your believe in reincarnation. Even if you don't you are likely to be entertained.

During World War II my mother was in her formative teen years. As she eventually learned of what had happened to the Jews she wished with all her heart that she could help at least one of these people. She got her wish years later, but hardly as she would ever have expected.

She started by marrying my father, a man who, though all Scandinavian, looked VERY Jewish. During WWII he had been in the army and faced anti-Jewish bigotry himself in the form of another soldier who hated him with a vengeance and went out of his way to be mean to my father. Then one day the guy found out that Dad's last name was Olson. He then apologized to my dad adding "I thought you were Jewish." Because of that Dad could hardly accept any apology.

It was to these two people I was born. Perhaps my soul had chosen these people in part because of these issues. I could be a baffling little kid, too. When I was in pre-school I would demand that my mother explain to me why we weren't Jewish. I would also seek out Jewish children to befriend in the early years of grade school. That was not an easy task back then since there were almost no Jews in Boulder, Colorado at the time. They had to drive to Denver to go to Temple. I still managed somehow.

As I got older I would have dreams I could not explain. In them I would often be wearing a green woolen coat with a yellow star on the breast. I could dream in fluent German, though when I studied it in school I was crap at it while awake. When I finally learned of the Holocaust I was shocked by the accuracy of my dreams.

As an adult I entered psychotherapy to deal with many of the issues that were turning my life upside down. After awhile I ended up asking my therapist if she could recommend a past-life regression therapist after having read about how successful it was and believing that I had been in the Holocaust. It turned out that she was able to do this kind of therapy. We began the next week.

The memories she brought up in me. I now remember at least the basics of more than a dozen lives from the past. Those lives did include an astonishing and, at times, horrifying life under Nazi rule. When we started this therapy I had been suffering from bulimia. As soon as we started that problem vanished, never to reappear.

I won't go into all of the details of the memories, that would take ages, and kind of defeat the purpose of the novel I am writing based on these regressions.

During these years I took on obsessively reading biographies and autobiographies of survivors. I was amazed at what strong and resilient people these folks were, despite still carrying obvious emotional and sometimes physical scars from their experiences. My therapist's office was just a couple of doors down from a large bookstore and if there was time before my appointment I would stop and shop.

One evening I was looking over the books for a new autobiography and there wasn't much of a selection. I finally settled on a slim volume and I started to walk away from the shelves, not terribly happy with my choice. All of a sudden, at about three feet away, I stopped, turned around, walked back and stuck out my hand. Beneath it I found a book I had somehow overlooked. It was Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust by Yonasson Gershom.

I couldn't believe my eyes. It was my subject. I dropped the other book back on the shelf and grabbed this one. It was like I was having some sort of a religious experience.

In that book I discovered that not only was I not alone, I was also right in line with the statistical norm of those who reported these memories and certain behaviors. Rabbi Gershom had noted that most of the people telling him about their experiences were baby boomers and had baffled their parents with unusual questions and/or behavior as children. That was me.

The people who had survived the Holocaust alive are dwindling as the years go by. Many of them have left their stories for us, but we still run the risk of forgetting one of the most regrettable and horrifying events in history. The duty of remembering is falling to those who remember in a different way.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana

Men, Men, Men, Men, Manly Men

Many years ago I created the "Heckuva Guy Awards." I would print out certificates and give them out to guys I knew who went above and beyond in being wonderful, caring human beings while not compromising an inch of their masculinity.

I didn't give out a whole lot of them. My list of truly manly men is fairly short because I am quite discriminating in my choice for the awards.

On Saturday I had to say goodbye to one of the men on this list. He was my "second" godfather. For some reason my parents couldn't decide for sure who to make my godparents, so I ended up with two sets. We lost contact with my "first" godparents after my parents divorced. My "second" godparents were amazing people who managed to stay friends with both sides.

Dewey was one of the sweetest and kindest men who ever walked the planet. He was the man who put the gentle into gentleman. The only time that I heard of him raising a hand to one of his children was when his eldest daughter was a toddler and she made a run at the street. The thought of her ending up as a spot on the road scared him so much that she earned a spanking for it. My mother used to tell this story to demonstrate how kind he was. The spanking of his daughter just about killed him.

When he was a young man he met a young woman named Sonja from Sweden who was in the United States for a short time. He dated her during her time in Colorado. It wasn't until she was on a train going to New York to catch a ship home to Sweden that he realized that he was in love with her and couldn't let her go. He hopped a plane to New York (this was the early 50s and not something one did lightly) and met her train at Grand Central Station. It was like a scene from some Hallmark movie, though Sonja said it wasn't quite as romantic as it sounds. It was a hot and dusty day and they found out that the state of New York had a three-day waiting period for a marriage license. They ended up taking a train back to Colorado and making a beeline for a Justice of the Peace.

They scraped and saved and bought a tiny cracker-box of a starter home right next door to my parents. When their first daughter was about to arrive in this world it was my mother who drove them to the hospital. The story goes that a skunk wandered into the path of the car and Sonja started moaning that the hospital would never let them in if they all smelled like skunk. Mom managed to miss the skunk and Gina came into the world without further incident.

When I came along over a year later Mom and Dad not only brought me home, they brought me to THEM, my other family. Gina was enamored of me and called me "Boo Boo," which is toddler speak for baby.

For many years our families traded Christmas Eves -- one year at our house and one year at theirs. Part way through the evening Dewey would disappear and like magic a Swedish Santa Claus would show up and hand out our gifts. Of course I always knew it was him. Though one year their son, Tom, showed me the mask and Sonja got mad at him for ruining Santa for me. No one really understood that I never believed that Santa was real. It was just that to me it was a wonderful time of year when even the adults were playing my favorite game of let's pretend. It was more about believing in miraculous possibilities for me.

Dewey was a very hard-working kind of guy. He worked at the Borden Dairy in Denver for many years. One Christmas Gina and I both got toy Elsie the Cows from there. Elsie would moo when you turned her over. I remember the times when he was working the night shift and we would try to play as quietly as possible so as not to disturb his sleep. He was the kind of man that made even us little kids want to be nice to him, even when you'd rather be running around screaming.

He always had a smile for a friend and a story to tell. He was a cowboy somewhere in his heart and away from work you would find him in boots and hat. He had, indeed, come from old Colorado pioneer stock.

He eventually went from the dairy to working for Itsy Bitsy Machines. For a few months I worked there as a temp and would occasionally run into him in the halls of an extremely large building. He always had time to stop and talk with me.

He passed his love of horses on to Gina and her daughter. He helped his granddaughter when buying a horse. He would get her to horse shows and help her curry the horse.

At the time of his passing he and Sonja had been married for more than 60 years. All three of his kids had good relationships with him. At his funeral his daughter Lisa said that she had learned the importance of silence from him. Everyone laughed because she had once been known for being a motor-mouth. It was a long education.

The world is a little poorer now that it has lost one heckuva guy. I wish I had gotten around to giving him one of the certificates. I hope he knew that was how I thought of him.

Kilts and Kin

Okay, men, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Women find a man in a kilt very sexy. I don't

know exactly why, but we do. It can't be the knees really, because shorts don't do it so much.

It could be that we hope for a windy day, but since you are all built with pretty much the same equipment, I don't think that this reasoning holds up either.

My favorite reasoning gets into Scotsmen and Irishmen being secure enough in their manhood to be able to wear a skirt, but I've had to rethink that when you consider that men have been wearing kilts far longer than women have been wearing short skirts.

Now I am wondering if it isn't some sort of cell memory handed down from our fore-mothers and the men they fell in love with centuries ago. That or past-life memories we harbor of men we loved in a previous existence. I don't know

What I do know is that I can go to the Scottish/Irish Highland Games in Estes Park, Colorado each September and sit and watch the caber toss for hours without realizing that I am actually watching SPORTS. Okay, men hurling telephone poles isn't exactly the sort of sport that saturates ESPN and there is definitely something overtly phallic about the event, but it is still sports. I rarely choose a single man to cheer for. I seem to just sit and enjoy the view (and I'm not talking about the mountains, which ARE fantastic).

My friend Randi would be sitting right beside me and noting the same thing, trying to hold back the drool and laughing at herself.

Randi doesn't know if she has any Celtic blood, but I know I do. I am descended of the Davidson clan in Scotland. For anyone who really knows me, it should come as no surprise that the Davidson lands are in Glen Ness, not far from Loch Ness. For anyone who is reading the Outlander book series by Diana Gabaldon, the Davidsons were/are neighbors of the Frasers and McKenzies. For anyone who isn't reading the series, I highly recommend it.

I do not possess a kilt in clan tartan. Instead I have a modest woolen scarf. The tartan strongly resembles the more popular Black Watch tartan. While wearing it at the Games I found that Davidsons and those from the Black Watch frequently mistake each other for clansmen, which can prove quite amusing. A Black Watch gentleman and I stopped short once and sized one another up. Then we exchanged clans, laughed, and moved on.

While I'm confessing my drooling attraction to men in kilts, I may as well make one other confession -- I LOVE bagpipe music. Yeah. I never claimed to be sane.

Jaws -- The Weight-Loss Dilemma

The whole country from news anchors to late night comedians have been giving New Jersey governor Chris Christie a hard time about having Lapband surgery to lose weight. These were the same people who were giving him a hard time for being overweight in the first place. Skinny people just don't get it and that is an American tragedy because there are fewer skinny people every day in this country.

I've been through much of the same thing. I have been overweight almost my entire life. The last argument I remember my parents having before they separated was about whether I was getting fat or not. I was only seven. And I may as well have been invisible. It was as though they were discussing a piece of furniture than needed refinishing.

I spent years being criticized for my weight. Ironically, the more I was picked on for the fat, the fatter I got. This was because I had picked up the habit of eating to comfort myself when I felt miserable -- and I felt miserable most of the time.

My father and stepmother picked on me a great deal about my weight. In college I asked for an extra $9 to be able to take an extra dance class. They were very tight about money and freaked out all over me and denied my request in no uncertain and not very kind terms. After I left the room one of my step-brothers gave them some grief in return. He pointed out that they were always on my case to exercise more but they weren't at all willing to back it up with actions to support me doing what they wanted. I ended up with my $9 and my dance class. I lost 25 pounds that school year.

That single act of support did not change my life. The support began and ended there. So that particular portion of my weight-loss journey was short-lived. From there I ended up diving headlong into years of eating disorders. The first being anorexia, followed by bulimia. Years of therapy helped me emerge from that particular self-destructive behavior.

Years later I ended up in a bad job situation where I was constantly being undermined and at the same time started having thyroid problems at the same time. After years of fairly stable, though still obese, weight, I started gaining weight again. I went on a special weight-loss program that my doctor got me a scholarship for and managed to gain weight while on the diet.

My health deteriorated and I was losing my ability to move. I couldn't hold down a job when I couldn't make it from my car into a building. It was taking all I could do to get from my house into my car which was only the matter of about 12 to 15 feet. Because of my thyroid issues (Grave's Disease) I was not only gaining weight, I was losing muscle.

Like Governor Christie I finally decided that I had to go drastic to save my life. I, too, had Lapband surgery. Not everyone was thrilled with my decision. There is a public perception that reaching this point in your life is a personal failure -- that somehow you are less of a person because you weren't able to just lose the weight. This perceptions persists in spite of the fact that diets succeed less than 2% of the time. They have a horrible track record.

It is no wonder that Christie kept his surgery a secret. Who wants to be judged as a failure when trying to do the right thing for themselves and their loved ones? The procedure is not a guarantee of success, either. I just hope that he has a larger number of people supporting him than I did. Emotional support means a lot.

BTW, "support" does NOT mean monitoring and judging every piece of food that goes into the person's mouth. Weight loss can be hampered just as much by eating too little as by eating too much. Support is loving the person and demonstrating that love whenever possible. Find out from them what you can do to assist in their journey. Chances are they are now on a diet you may not understand.

I lost weight afterwards, though not as much as I would have liked thanks to my wonky thyroid which quickly went too low after surgery. However, I lost enough weight to get myself mobile and able to work again, which was my primary goal in having the surgery. I still struggle every day. I still have a huge amount of weight to lose.

Governor Christie still has a struggle ahead of him. This is not magic, it is a tool. Years later I still cannot eat as much as I used to. So I still have the benefit of the band helping me limit my intake, but I still also hit times when I engage in emotional eating and times when I want to forget about diets and just eat Christmas dinner.

So, instead of making fun of him or expecting him to fail, become a part of this cheering squad. He has taken a big, really scary step in the right direction.

Hoarding -- A Personal Confession

Hi, my name is Laurie, and I am a hoarder.

Okay, not as bad as those people you see on television shows like Hoarders and Hoarding Buried Alive. There is only the one cat and she does her business only in her litter box or outside. I take care of mice and the occasional fly promptly. The electricity and plumbing work. The furnace is a bit dodgy, but that is new and in the works.

I am a third generation hoarder. My grandmother kept just about everything, especially after having raised her children during the depression. With her, however, she was able to keep everything neatly filed and organized so it never became the out-of-control mess. When she passed away my mother kept an odd assortment of her mother's hoard to bring home and add to her hoard.

My mother was approaching the level of the television show, but did not quite make it there. The saddest part of her hoarding for me was that I eventually had to distance myself from her and her home as she began to blame me for the mess in her home. If I brought fast food to her home to eat while I was there helping her with the computer or what not, she would begin cleaning this up before I was done eating -- in the middle of a horrendous mess that was far more in need of cleaning than a couple of taco wrappers and sauce packets.

A couple of times a friend and I tried to clean the house for her. The first time was when she had gone off to Georgia for a family reunion. We hauled out so much trash that I had to arrange to use the trash and recycling receptacles of her neighbors. We cleared out more than a dozen years of junk mail and
 old calendars.And that was just the beginning. Of course, the cleaning did not last.

Another time Mum was disappearing for several hours every Saturday for an art class and we used that time to clean house again -- this time as her Christmas and birthday presents. Again, it didn't last.

Several years ago Mum had to move out of her mobile home and into an apartment as a part of getting subsidized housing. More people were on hand to help this time. Mum tried to help, but much like the people on the television shows, she wanted to go through absolutely everything and throw away nothing. No matter what we said, she couldn't understand that the entire hoard from a large two-bedroom mobile home was not going to fit into a small two-bedroom apartment. Finally we got enough to the apartment for her to go stay there while we finished up the mobile home. So we moved her and told her to stay there.

After more than a month of moving and cleaning it was just impossible to get it all done. Fortunately the mobile home was slated to be hauled away and discarded. So we ended up just throwing trash into several big piles as we searched for what needed to move and tossed the rest. Even then we weren't able to get everything moved. Most of the books had to be left behind.

Mum busted my chops for so long over what hadn't gotten moved that I finally told her off. I pointed out that we had spent WEEKS moving what we could and that within that God-awful mess it was impossible to find everything. A large number of us had shut down our lives for those weeks to do this just for her and instead of any gratitude all we were getting was complaining. She was also damn lucky that I had lost my job at just the right time to allow me to do this for her or she would have lost the apartment and the subsidy.

She was much kinder after that, but no less a hoarder. After the move she had an elder care helper come in and help her with things like housework. I charged the woman with helping keep down the hoarding. She did as I asked and kept Mum from picking up broken toys from the grounds of the apartment building and bringing them home.

Last year Mum passed away and I was still faced with a mountain of crap that had come with her. Toward the last few months of her life she finally understood when I called her a hoarder and what a hoarder was. I told her in the light that I was also one, as is a good friend of ours.

As I was packing up her things to be tossed, given away, or kept I was constantly amazed at many things that I found. When the friends and family who had come to help me get the apartment cleaned out heard me swear they knew I had run across something baffling. I gave all of them whatever I wanted as long as it wasn't something I needed to keep or sell.

Being a hoarder myself I knew that I needed to be strong. I was fairly ruthless in getting rid of stuff. Every now and then someone would say "Oh, you want to keep that!" I would emphatically decline. If they asked me if I was sure then I offered it to them. They would decline and I would respond with "If you don't want it, why would I?"

I still kept too much. Much of it is sitting on my patio and inside my car. I am loathe to bring it inside until I have a proper place for it. Much of it will still be given away or sold. I have just been waiting for winter to wain enough to allow me to really get at things. Murphy's Law being what it is we have had 47 inches of snow in April and another foot in May so far.

From the inside, hoarding is a complicated and difficult thing. I can get easily confused and baffled on what to get rid of and what to keep, not to mention what to do with the things I choose to keep. I will get to the end of an evening and only then realize that the dishes went undone, in spite of the intention to do them. It becomes easier to leave everything rather than trying to deal with them -- much like difficult emotions that I haven't dealt with. Having learned to hang on to everything doesn't help.

So I have to work at it every day. My daily to-do list includes such obvious things as "collect trash" to make sure it all makes it in the bin, and "wash dishes" to help me remember. Things will still get away from me. The house still smell of the litter box, though I can't smell it any more. The important thing is that I am aware and keep trying.

The one thing I keep reminding myself is that if it lost in the mess and I have forgotten I had it, I don't need it. If something is lost in the mess and I bought three more because I couldn't find it then I need to find a proper place for that item. There is a fear of lack involved. A terror that when I am truly in need I will not have what I need. It is not really about the stuff. It is about feeling unsupported emotionally so I try to manufacture what appears to be support.

With Mum gone I will also not end up with so much stuff. She was constantly buying me stuff I "needed." This is how I ended up with far more sheets, towels, socks, undies, pots, pans, dishes, and books than I needed. A friend once suggested that I get rid of it all. I replied that I would but then she would just buy it all for me again.

My last bout of unemployment became my mission to downsize while I searched for a new job. I figure that I threw out at least a ton of old crap. I gave away 75 bags and boxes to charity. And still I have too much.

So my struggle continues.

The Depression

Okay, I had originally planned to write about mental depression, but it was too depressing. So I thought I would write about the Great Depression, which is slightly less depressing. It's a matter of degrees.

The Depression was a terrible time in this country, but it was not just about the economy even though that is what most people focus on. It was also a time of severe drought and one of the biggest man-made ecological disasters in history. Good times.

WHAT?!?

Allow me to digress. There was so much difficulty in the world that ordinary people became heroes. They weren't jumping over buildings or stopping trains with their bare hands, but they were out there finding ways to support their families when there didn't seem to be a way. Times like that often brought out the best in people.

My mother was born just before the stock market crashed in 1929. It was the family joke that it was this was the catalyst that started the chain of events that led to the crash. Yep. It was all her fault. So she was raised in that time of lack and want, and it affected her for the rest of her life.

Before she passed away, Mum had been writing a memoir about this time in history and the way families were drawn together. It is about the simple life that was lived during these times. She died before she finished the book. I have it on disk, but I have not yet felt like facing it yet. Someday I hope to finish it for her.

She told me many of the stories of growing up in that day and age. She would come home from school, grab a pickle out of the fridge, and go lie on the living room floor with her head under the radio while she listened to her favorite kids' shows. It was what kids did back then before computers and television.

My grandmother was the local busybody. This was not for the gossip value though. She would stand at the window as children would walk to and from school and make notes on who was missing shoes or warm coats. Then she would contact churches and the Ladies Aid Society to find these items for the family. In addition to taking care of her own family, she did her best to help other families as well.

Many women did what they had to for their families. In many cases they had to find ways to feed their families with little or no income. They would pickle green tumbleweeds and purslane. Purslane is a common weed -- almost as common as the dandelions. They would also pick the tender young leaves of dandelions to cook for a nutritious side dish.

My father and his brother hunted small game such as squirrels and pigeons to help their mother put food on the table. Their father suffered from tuberculosis and was often away in a sanitarium. When he was home he was a barber during a time when most people chose to cut their hair at home to save money. There were times when he was lucky to make 50 cents a day to support a family of 7.

When the collars or cuffs on a man's shirt became worn and threadbare his wife would remove them, turn them around and sew them back on to extend the life of the shirt. When garments were completely worn out my grandmother would remove buttons, hooks and eyes, and zippers so that they could be used to make the next outfit.

My grandfather was a banker in a small bank -- one of the few to not close its doors in the panic after the stock market crash. He made sure that he remained present in the family and kept a critical eye on the family finances to make sure that the kids always had what they needed. This was especially important for my mother who was sick with allergies and asthma a great deal of the time and had managed to contract a serious bladder infection during these years. Back then no one had health insurance and so you had to be prepared to pay everything out-of-pocket.

Men who lost their livelihoods during this time suffered most of all. Jobs were not just how they supported their families, it was a definition of who they were as a person. Some managed to reinvent themselves and create new jobs and identities. Others found different ways to support their families. Doing either took a great deal of inner strength.

It was a time when taking any sort of charity or perceived hand out was considered a failure. Even taking a job with one of the many public works projects going on at the time was seen by some men as a failure. It meant giving up on their chosen path in life and resorting to accepting some sort of help from outside. These men were heroes for doing what had to be done. They showed up every day, often doing things they were ill-suited to do, to make sure their families survived.

There were no social safety nets back then. When men lost their jobs the family income generally ended. There was no welfare. There were no food stamps. There were no food pantries to give food to the needy. Many of these programs grew out of what happened to people during the depression.

To get by one of the families in my mother's neighborhood took advantage of the drought. As the drought dried out the lakes of Minnesota they would collect turtles and sell them to the big hotels in Minneapolis for soup. It didn't make them rich, but they were able to survive.

Many of us today spend some time living a modern version of the Depression whether it is due to unemployment, being underpaid, or having amassed a large amount of debt. This is when ramen noodles become a mainstay of the diet.

A friend of mine and I were discussing the things we did to get by when we faced times like these -- from eating cheap mac and cheese to cutting up worn out sheets to use instead of toilet paper. I worked part-time cleaning motel rooms while job hunting once and saved the used bars of soap to grate into soap powder to wash clothes and dishes. Fortunately times are better now.

It's a good thing that things are better now. I can't handle the thought of one more bite of ramen noodles in this lifetime.

Ancestry -- A Writer's Journey Into The Past

I took several writing classes through Continuing Education at the University of Colorado post college.

They were the best classes I ever had on writing because they were taught by published writers instead of academics. One of the early assignments I was given in the first class I took was to write a recipe for me.

It was an exercise in creativity. It posed the question of how to define myself. We had no other guidance in how to approach the subject. It was up to us.

After due consideration, I chose to use my ancestry to create my recipe. As a writer I couldn't just list all of the countries that make up my bloodlines. I had to find other, more creative ways to same thing.

On my father's side I am Scandinavian. His father was from Norway and his mother was a Swede. So I started with several cups of light from the Lands of the Midnight Sun. Then I added a bit of Viking stubbornness and ambition.

My mother's side was a bit more complicated. While her mother was all German, her father was a mix from Britain (what I call British mutt) and a dash of French.

So I continued with a bit of Teutonic determination and ingenuity. A tablespoon of English stiff upper lip. An ounce to two of Highland second sight. A wee dram of Scottish pride. A splash of Celtic humor. A large dash of Gaelic fire. A pinch of French style and grace.  A trace of Gallic rudeness.

Season with the salt of the earth. Spice with a peppery temper, a touch of sage for wisdom, thyme for longevity, and ginger for spirit. Mix in an old soul and bake at 98.6 degrees in mother's womb for 9 months. Cover with American culture before serving.

Somewhere I still have the actual recipe I created, but it would take a major search of my papers to find it at this point. The instructor liked the result so much that she read the result out loud to the class. It was a delightful moment of validation after years of silent struggle and a stack of form rejection slips (yes, it was back in the days of snail mail).

I have always been intrigued by my ancestry. As a writer that makes a lot of sense. Ancestry is not just about bloodlines and relatives. It is about stories. The stories of the people I am descended from.

What made my ancestors leave their old, familiar lives and journey into the unknown America? I had heard that my great grandmother left a nice board house in Norway to come and that when she first laid eyes on the dirt sod house she was now to live in made her sit down and cry. What was the story of my Irish great-great-grandmother and her escape from the potato famine?

Most interesting was the General. General Robert F. Smith had been a colonel during the civil war at an age when most men were winding down.  So I went on Ancestry.com and began the backwards search. This was far harder than the website would have you believe. The further west you go the sketchier the record keeping. I would run across obvious holes in this history so I would question my mother. She did her best to help me, but she was old enough to be slipping away from many of those memories.

There were places where what she told me did explain some holes. One part of the family tended to go by their middle names. Mum telling me that allowed me to connect some dots that Ancestry.com would never have been able to.

She also told me about her great uncle who was something of a black sheep. He had come to stay with her family when he was ill and no one else in the family would talk to him. My grandfather eventually had to ask his uncle to leave since the family was starting to turn on him as well. After many years Mum had come to realize that this bachelor uncle had been such a family pariah because he had been gay. This explained why his name disappeared from the family records permanently.

I finally made my way back to the General, his wife, and all 14 kids (whew!). When he enlisted to go into the Civil War he had already done his military service. He had chosen to go to war to defend the Constitution of the United States and the rights of all people to be free. The day I found the record of his entering into the army for a second time was 150 years to the day later. So wild!

My frustration started then. There were no further records going back. I had hit a mysterious brick wall that even Mum couldn't help me get past. I cancelled my Ancestry account (I couldn't pay $40 a month for something I wasn't going to be using until I received additional information). All of the information is supposed to still be stored on the website so that I can return later when I am ready.

Last year my mother passed away. Only one of her relatives was able to come to the memorial service -- one Robert F. Smith. No, not the General, of course, but Mum's younger cousin who had been named after the General. The day after the memorial service we sat on my patio and chatted. He had done deeper research on that part of the family. He had gone to the places and looked up records and letters for himself. He lived in Georgia right in the area where the General had led his men in the war.

It turns out that the General is an enigma in the family, not just to me. He had been largely disowned by a father who thought he would never amount to anything. Daddy dearest had actually left all of his money and property to a young woman on the condition that she marry Robert, but maintain control of these assets. They did marry, but somewhere along the drama Robert had changed his name to Smith. The family name may have been Engle or Engel, we aren't sure.

What had he done to tick his father off that much and believe that he couldn't handle money or property? That may remain a mystery forever unless Cousin Bob finds a new thread to pull on to unravel more of the family tapestry.

The Smiths had moved west from Philadelphia to Illinois where they purchased land and started a general store. They made part of their money by selling their land and buying it back again with the ebb and flow of the economy. The man who would amount to "nothing" became an army colonel and after the war he was promoted to General by Ulysses S. Grant. Later he was charged by the Governor of Illinois with the military duty of moving the Mormons out of the state.

Three of his daughters never married, were suffragettes, and opened and ran businesses in a time before women did this sort of thing. One of those daughters became an agent for an insurance firm in Chicago.

We may never know the actual story of the General, but has been an incredible journey finding all of this out. We seem to carry these stories in our cells so maybe one day it will reveal itself to me.

What do I mean by that? I went to hear author Amy Tan speak years ago. She was talking about writing "The Bonesetter's Daughter." She had reached deep inside of herself to pull out the story. When she had completed it she showed the tale to her mother. Her mother freaked out and demanded to know who in the family had blabbed the family secret. It was something Amy had never known about and that the family did not talk about. Still, she had managed to find it within herself.

A dear friend is working with a cousin of hers to write a book based on the experiences of their great-grandmother and her experience of being kidnapped by Indians during difficult times in the early days of Colorado. They find themselves constantly becoming emotional in the endeavor, as though they were experiencing it themselves.

All families have stories like these. Don't assume that nothing ever happened in your family. What are your stories?

Aftermath -- Looking Back at the A-Z Blog Post Challenge

 I did it! I completed the month and all A-Z blog posts. Of course, this did not happen without consequences and rewards.

This last month has been a blast working to meet this challenge. It was surprisingly freeing and, after a year of writing as a professional blogger, brought me back to fun and the reason I write in the first place. It's not that I don't have fun writing professionally, but writing for my own blog loosened me up again. More ideas started flowing. It helped my professional writing start flowing more easily as well.

I took some chances with my writing over the last month that I might not have otherwise taken. I revealed myself in ways I never had before. This led to some family issues, but it also opened us up to a greater understanding of one another.

I gathered more followers to my blogs as well. So that extends the reach of my writing. Some of my posts did better than others. I titled one "Uncensored" and that seems to have put people off. I think people may have assumed that it had something to do with sex and language, which it only did indirectly. It was mostly about writing truthfully and not allowing your inner censor to limit you.

Towards the end of the month the number of reads began to drop off, but I can't say I was really surprised by that. It can be a lot to read.

I plan to do the challenge again. This time I will do it totally on my own and probably not every day. The whole A-Z concept has given me so many ideas to write about that I want to continue. It is like I managed to pry the lid off of my brain and let out the whole can of worms.

I also have two other blogs that are seriously in need of additional material, so I will A-Z them as well.

So join me moving forward as I tackle Ancestry, Bullying, Comedy, Depression, Earthquakes, Falling, Gay Rights, Hoarding, Internal Voices, Just Joking . . .

Y -- Yakkity-Yak

Some people talk all the time. There are those who just like to hear themselves talk as though they find themselves the wittiest and most intelligent conversationalist of all times. Letting someone else
speak would be to ruin the conversation, unless, of course, the other person was saying something flattering.

Then there are those who keep talking because they are afraid of the silence. The empty spaces in conversation might lead to something terrifying like introspection into the areas where self-doubt and insecurity live.

My stepmother is one of those people who talk all of the time. At times it has become something of a source of amusement in the family

Several years ago we were loading into the RV to go on a family trip to a dude ranch in Wyoming. I was to travel along with my father and step-mother, as were my sister and her two daughters. My step-mother was bustling about making sure that everything was packed, including my father. She kept up a running commentary as she went.

One of my nieces finally leaned over to me, "We love Grandma, but she talks SO MUCH!" I stifled a laugh while my sister, horrified, quickly shushed her eldest. Oh, if her mother had overheard that!

Once the family had gathered at the ranch in Wyoming the subject came up again. This time my sister-in-law related a story of how my stepmother had been talking to her baby son. "Hi Collin. This is your Grandma talking, Collin!" Off to the side my father said, "Yeah, get used to it!"

It should come as no surprise that the rest of the family has always been fairly reticent in comparison. Perhaps because there was nothing left to say, or perhaps because there was no room to say it.

After years of consideration I have decided that she falls into the second of the two categories that I outlined. She has not had the easiest life and talking may help her keep from reflecting on the hard times too much. Giving in to a silence that might let the past in might be just too difficult to deal with. When my father passed away she had a hard time, not just because she had loved him so much, but because the person she was used to having around to talk to was no longer there.

She has since remarried to another man who is quiet and doesn't mind letting her talk as she needs to. She is blessed in that way.

On the other hand, I have always been fairly quiet. This is largely because I grew up being jumped on for speaking my mind or for "misunderstanding" conversations.

My mother used to tell this story of an early interaction between my father and me when I was about two years old:

A number of my father's friends were over at the house, possibly a Thursday evening since that was poker night, and Dad wanted to show me off by getting me to say my name.

"Who are you?" he asked me.

"I am me," I responded gravely. Little kids are so literal.

"No, no. Who are you?" he asked again.

"I am me," I said again.

We went around and around until he was angry, I was crying, and Mom had to come in from the kitchen to negotiate detente.

For some reason he never thought of asking the question in any other way, so he kept getting the same answer. The simple fix? What is your name. Two-year-olds are not known for getting subtext.

Such was our relationship until he passed away. Such was the sort of relationship I had with many people in my life. So I learned to shut up.

One of the early interactions with my step-family had me voicing my opinion that I didn't care for the works of Mark Twain (I still don't for the most part). Instantly all three of my step-brothers ganged up on me and one called me a Commie. Chaos ensued for several minutes until my stepmother stepped in and told them to back off because I wasn't used to having brothers.

Well, it was true that I wasn't used to having brothers, but I was used to having people jump down my throat for having an opinion. Never mind opening up a discussion of why I don't like Mark Twain -- just cut me off at the knees.

(For the record, I never cared for "boy stories" so Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn never spoke to me, not to mention being forced to read them. Nothing kills the enjoyment of reading like having to read what you don't wanting and then analyzing it to death for subtext the author never intended. I have since become acquainted with other works of Twain's that I quite enjoy.)

After a number of years of therapy and a Prozac prescription I am not quite as reticent as I used to be, except for when my step-mother is talking. After all, there has to be some balance in the universe.

S -- Sisters and the Surprise Stephanie

I started out as a very lonely only child, especially after my parents split up when I was seven. For both parents I ended up being a piece of luggage that they just dragged behind them. I found my mother's life more interesting since she was into art, theater, and music. With my dad I usually found myself wandering after him at the golf course or being baffled by sports on television.

One summer when I was twelve my mother was the make-up director for a play at Nomads, the local amateur theater, The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch. I was used to hanging out around the theater and had spent many hours doing my homework sitting under racks of costumes or at the make-up counters. I don't remember much about this particular play except for one thing. As I was watching the play in dress-rehearsal sitting in the seats I was taken with the young woman playing the part of the preacher's wife.

Every time someone started calling Sneaky Fitch a son of a . . . the preacher's wife would interrupt with "prairie dog" to keep the dialog clean. This was the early 70s and even the toilet flush sound had not even made it onto television quite yet. She stuck in my mind so clearly. I liked her so much.

I didn't see her again until the following April when I walked into the church with my dad as he married my stepmother and the young woman was suddenly my sister.

Betty is five years older than me and every bit of worth that liking that I sensed in her from that first moment she came anonymously to my attention. Decades later I still see her as a wonderful woman and a marvelous mother. I am proud that she is my sister.

The odd thing is that through all of these years I kept having a strange belief that I had a real sister out in the world somewhere. I puzzled over this one for a long, long time. I was sure that my parents wouldn't have given up any other child that they would have had. They were both fairly straight-laced people, even though Mum was a bit of a free spirit. I just couldn't figure out where this feeling was coming from.

Then one day, shortly after my 47th birthday, I had stopped by my mother's house for some reason I no longer remember. In a flat voice she started telling me a story from a time in her early 20s. I had known about this time in her life, but not this particular sequence of events in which she had been out with friends and one of the young men had offered to drive her home. She reluctantly agreed even though she didn't know him very well.

Ultimately he raped her and she ended up pregnant. She interrupted her college career to go live in a home for unwed mothers in St. Paul and that spring she gave birth to a baby girl at Minneapolis  General Hospital -- my real sister. Though she knew that she was giving the baby up for adoption, Mum named her Stephanie.

I was floored. My feelings that I had a sister out there had been real, not my imagination. Not only that, Mum had not led the placid, uneventful, Midwest life that I had always believed. She was suddenly a real person, not some mythical creature. Where my life had always seemed to suck so much, hers had always seemed so textbook. Now I knew the truth. She was just as human.

More importantly, I have a sister! No longer an only child. Not only that I was not crazy for having searched faces around me looking for a sister I supposedly did not have.

Mum swore me to secrecy, still embarrassed by the incident. She also did not want my to search for Stephanie. Now that Mum has passed away I want to find Stephanie so badly. I have made a few internet forays to see what I can find, but have come up empty so far.

Stephanie would be in her early 60s now. I would like to meet her, though I wouldn't expect for her to suddenly become a part of my family at this late date. I just want to look into the face of what might have been, and tell her about the woman her birth mother was and how hard it was for Mum to give her up.

Stephanie Scott Dawson, where are you?

P -- Pop's Personality

My father was a good man, for the most part. I want to say that right up front. Because some of what I am going to say may make it seem otherwise. Like so many of us, he was among the walking wounded. That, in turn, caused him to occasionally wound others.

He grew up in a large, poor family. His father was a barber who suffered from tuberculosis, so his father was often away in a sanitarium for treatment. When he was home he was not always the nicest man. Dad raised himself up out of this to go on to college to get a Master's Degree and become a teacher. He had really wanted to become an engineer but after going though the Depression and World War II he thought he would go into something more secure. So he became a teacher. He taught shop for many years and added some math classes later in his career.

This was the baggage he brought with him into his first marriage and the life of his child. He was often mentally abusive and occasionally physically abusive. I won't go into detail, but by the time my mother divorced him I was probably one of the only children in history to not want their parents to get back together. Life had been truly horrible at times.

Our relationship that had once been so solid began to degrade as he slowly transformed from being a dad to being a father. I became an object of constant criticism which created feelings that I was a total failure. I was mystified by the disappearance of my daddy. It was like part of him had died.

After a few years he met another woman and he remarried. My stepmother made me miserable, but made him happy. He also finally had the larger family that he had always wanted.

My mother was the first to admit that she was not the right woman for Dad, but that my stepmother was, and she was happy for him. Much the same way, I was not the right child for him, but his step-children were.

It was like he had two different personalities. One for me and Mum, and another for his new family. We were vilified and they were beatified. From the first I was clearly ostracized from my step-family. The other kids were included in the honeymoon. I was not. They had Christmas together and I was tacked on to the end. I was told not to get them anything for Christmas (I did anyway). I never called him Pop. That was the monicker that my step-siblings gave him to differentiate between him and their real father.

My stepmother was very much like my father and bullied me as much as he did. She was not above bullying her own children as well, but most of that was saved for me, and for one of her kids who wasn't as mainstream as the others.

There were people over the years who asked me why I didn't just abandon my father (and stepmother) altogether. One was that I did love my dad. Before he changed into the stiff father, he had been a wonderful daddy at least often enough for us to have really created a relationship. The other part is that neither of them are actually bad person and somewhere underneath the bullying they meant well. They both just really sucked at showing that they wanted something better for me. They tended to believe in the stick, not the carrot. When they weren't seeing the results they wanted they would just lean harder on the stick.

Dad did not want me to become a writer and spent years trying to shove me onto a more "secure" path. In other words, he wanted me to make the same mistake he had made in not becoming an engineer. For some reason he seemed to think that I was totally focused on becoming famous rather than doing what I loved. For years I said that the minute my writing came with a check attached then he would be fine with it. When I began work for a local newspaper, my prediction became true. However, his pride in this came to me by word of mouth. Heaven forbid that he ever give me a compliment or show pride in me to my face.

When my father passed away in 1999 I cried buckets and I have felt a little derailed ever since. I miss the old man. Let's face it, there a few families that aren't screwed up on some level. It's part of being a family and living in such close emotional proximity. When you throw a step family into that you are just adding fuel to the fire.

I still have issues with being bullied by my stepmother, but I love my step siblings dearly. They are a wonderful bunch and so are their families. I sometimes think of her as the price I pay to get to have the rest of them. That and some serious character-building challenges.

I'm just glad that Dad found the right woman for him and that they were happy with each other. And that I didn't have to live with the two of them all that much. After all, I'm enough of a character as it is.

M -- My Mother

As with most people, my mother was a huge part of my life. She passed away last summer from a hemorrhagic stroke. She was still living alone at the age of 84 and it was just lucky that I found her that morning, collapsed on the bathroom floor. She was still alive but blood was coming from her mouth and I could hear the death rattle. I immediately called 911 and the ambulance was there very quickly. Because of her small apartment they had to load her onto a sheet and carry her out.

By the time I caught up with her at the hospital she was on life support. After a quick chat with the ER doctor I had them remove the life support. Mum and I had had the end-of-life talk and so I knew her wishes. The hospital chaplain called our minister. The minister arrived shortly after Mum passed. He was clearly shaken by her loss. We had a short prayer over her, I told the hospital who would be handling her remains, and a friend took me to lunch to make sure I would eat.

The next few weeks were a blur as I had to pack up and get moved out of her apartment, fill out all sorts of paperwork, and plan the memorial service. The day after the memorial service two friends and I took her ashes into the mountains and set her free in her favorite mountain valley when it was at the peak of the aspen trees autumn gold.

Mum and I had had a sometimes tumultuous relationship, but we ultimately became very close as both mother and daughter and as friends.

The last photo of Mum as I was explaining why my camera did not need film.

She, too, had dreamed of being a writer. She never pushed these dreams on me -- for the most part. I had made my own choice to become a writer without knowing that she had wanted to write. I eventually discovered a stash of books that she had kept from a writing correspondence course she had once taken. While she supported my desire to write, my father did his best to tear it down. Small wonder they ended up divorced.

Over the years Mum became my biggest fan. At one point she absolutely insisted that I enter a poetry contest. I won first place. That was the beginning of my winning many, many poetry awards and pushing myself to learn how to write more poetry forms, from Senyru to Tanka, and Sonnets to Villanelles. Mum also wrote poetry and won numerous awards as well.

Last year, just a few months before she passed, I gave her a copy of the first draft of my first novel. She was so excited by the volume and loved it. I still have to live up to Mum's final request of me -- to make sure the book gets published.

I'm working on it, Mummy! I promised you and I will keep that promise.

There is one other book I will be working on for her. She passed away in the midst of writing a book about growing up during the Great Depression. I want to take what she has written and complete it for her as a thank you for passing the torch of the writing dream to me.