then there were two

My brother Doug died tonight. The storyteller, the basket weaver, the fisherman, the drunkard, the painter. That leaves one living relative in my immediate family. My sister. The women. It wasn't a contest. It isn't like we set out to live longer than our older brothers, but we did. Well, I guess it remains to be seen if we actually live longer. We are, after all, younger than them. To some it may not sound so serious, but I started out with a big family and we're down to two of us. My sister said it well: "He did pretty good for a Kinney," meaning, he lived a long life for a male in my family. His younger brothers preceded him by many years, as did our parents. His wife, Joyce, the first three letters of her name an apt description, survives, and two children, Pieper and James.

Ah well, death is no stranger to me. I am grateful to lay next to my husband tonight.

Doug. There are legends about him in Port Orford, and Brookings, and in the Applegate Valley. Now all my brothers are in heaven because I wish it.

Dante said, "the hottest circle of hell is reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."

two grapefruit

There isn't much left when you peel a pink grapefruit and take the time to get all the white stuff off, so I eat two and dip each segment of perfectly peeled pink flesh in sugar. A delicacy, and something to do while watching Antiques Roadshow. My father peeled them that way. Its funny the stories that come down with time, what sticks, what doesn't.

I finished my book. The title is Life on Dry Land. I hope someone will publish it. Now, I have to write another one. I've already started six, and the pieces I've already written, the quilt scraps, I will stitch together at some point with words so clever and seams so invisible it will seem like it was always just one story.

Enough with the sewing metaphors. I just basted the sleeve of Molly's "neverending sweater" a once-beautiful but never completed, Irish cableknit fisherman's sweater. Mol sits in her chair -- not the one no longer occupied by Bill, her husband who just passed a few months ago -- she wouldn't sit in his chair. Anyway, she sits and knits and knits and now, she has asked me to put a dart in the sleeve. A dart, for the uninitiated, is a wedge of fabric "taken in" to make the garment more fitted. Typically, you see a dart in the shaping of a bodice, but this dart is in the sleeve. Seems Mol went on a few too many rows and one sleeve is wider than the other and it is easier to make the dart than to find a person with one very fat arm.

Such is my work.

I've ordered a Writer's Market, so I can begin the search for a publisher. People still do that. Vanity publishing is a possibility, but I'm not that anxious or motivated. Now, according to people who do this shit, I will be responsible for marketing and getting the word out about my book. So you read it here first. Buy my freakin' book. Thank you.