Wednesday, December 27, 2023
more grief diaries
Hey there, friends. This is another placeholder post for the end of this long sad year. I'm still here. And I'm working on my next book. It's slow going but I keep adding to it and editing what I've already written, so I hope that someday it will be complete and ready to print. It's the memoir I started before Ryan died, about painting and walking in the north woods of Maine, and the experience of reading Thoreau's Journal and The Maine Woods. The book was underway and I was excited about it. I felt like there was more than just a kernel there. I had really begun. I could see it. In the winter and spring of 2021, I made a big push to finish my first memoir, Autobiography of an Island, about painting on Bear Island for all those years. And finish it I did. Then Ryan left, in July of 2021, and everything stopped. Life changed forever. Our time together, that often-joyous span of nearly thirty years, ended. What I could pick up again was fragmentary, for two years. It still is, in many ways. And I am writing down those fragments. The new memoir has become the story of us. It has two parts - before and after - the book I wanted and meant to write, and the book I now have to write, because of what has happened. I feel committed to writing our story, the story of us. No one else will. The purpose this project lends me is strong and bright, like Ry himself. I hope it will carry me forward through the next part of my life alone. I say alone, but Hodge is still here, and my close family and nearby friends, and the beach a mile or two from home. I can't say I'm looking forward to anything, but there is love here. And good work to do. That's a lot. Peace in the new year.
