Saying Farewell, Once and For All (Pandemic Clean Up: Post 3)

I was blessed – in more ways than I can count – to give birth first to a boy and then to a girl. It wouldn’t have mattered to me what their gender was, but it was a gift to have both in my life, and to observe, from the very subjective vantage point of a mother, how very different little boys and little girls can be.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of ‘Stuff’

The collection of ‘stuff’ has been an ongoing theme in my life, and it all started with my mother. A baby born at the end of the Great Depression, Mom was a collector of everything. Born into an extremely poor rural French Catholic family, she had to leave home at age 15 to get a job and to make a way for herself in the world. Education was (and is) a luxury that the poor could simply not afford.

Lucky-Lou

Photos of Lucky: Stephen Kenny (my brother-in-law)

The years after my divorce were pivotal ones for me. I came out of my shell and into my own. It’s not really that I learned to stand on my own two feet, so much as I learned that I had always been able to take care of myself.