We leave for London and beyond on 28 September. Our gift to one another.
Time To Study
4 weeks ago
23 September 2005
Four more days
An exciting adventure ahead for us. An anniversary trip? Sure, we have only been married five years. That is 35 in dog years and plenty of reason to celebrate. After what we have been through, celebrate? You bet! I will say, a lesser woman would have drowned in all the sludge of denial that exists in the Rockies.
We leave for London and beyond on 28 September. Our gift to one another.
We leave for London and beyond on 28 September. Our gift to one another.
01 September 2005
I like this poem. It speaks to me on a very basic level.
Take Care
"When a man dies, it's not only of his disease; he dies of his whole life." Charles Péguy
Our neighbor Laura Foley used to love to tell us, every spring when we returned from work in richer provinces, the season's roster of disease, bereavement, loss.
And all her stars were ill, and all her ailments worth detailing. We were young, and getting up into the world; we feigned a gracious interest when she spoke, but did a wicked slew of imitations, out of earshot.
Finally her bitterness drove off even such listeners as we, and one by one the winters nailed more cold into her house, until the decade crippled her, and she was dead. Her presence had been tiresome, cheerless, negative, and there was little range or generosity in anything she said.
But now that I have lost my certainty, and spent my spirit in a waste of one romance, I think enumerations have their place, descriptive of what keeps on keeping on. For dying's nothing simple, single. And the records of the odd demises (stone inside an organ, obstacles to brook, a pump that stops, some cells that won't, the fevers making mockeries of lust) are signatures of lively interest: they presuppose the life to lose.
And if the love of life's an art, and art is difficult, then we were less than laymen at it (easy come is all the layman knows). I mean that maybe Laura Foley loved life more, who kept so keen an eye on how it goes.
by Heather McHugh, from Hinge & Sign I Prefer © Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted with permission.
"When a man dies, it's not only of his disease; he dies of his whole life." Charles Péguy
Our neighbor Laura Foley used to love to tell us, every spring when we returned from work in richer provinces, the season's roster of disease, bereavement, loss.
And all her stars were ill, and all her ailments worth detailing. We were young, and getting up into the world; we feigned a gracious interest when she spoke, but did a wicked slew of imitations, out of earshot.
Finally her bitterness drove off even such listeners as we, and one by one the winters nailed more cold into her house, until the decade crippled her, and she was dead. Her presence had been tiresome, cheerless, negative, and there was little range or generosity in anything she said.
But now that I have lost my certainty, and spent my spirit in a waste of one romance, I think enumerations have their place, descriptive of what keeps on keeping on. For dying's nothing simple, single. And the records of the odd demises (stone inside an organ, obstacles to brook, a pump that stops, some cells that won't, the fevers making mockeries of lust) are signatures of lively interest: they presuppose the life to lose.
And if the love of life's an art, and art is difficult, then we were less than laymen at it (easy come is all the layman knows). I mean that maybe Laura Foley loved life more, who kept so keen an eye on how it goes.
by Heather McHugh, from Hinge & Sign I Prefer © Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted with permission.
Michelle gave me the idea
It seems the perfect thing for me, just like the journals I used to keep. Of course I have heard of the blog and it seemed meant for the geek with time on her hands.
Yet, for anyone who knows me, I have wanted to write about my life all my life. So I might just do that.
The unexamined life is not worth living for man.
Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology
Greek philosopher in Athens (469 BC - 399 BC)
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