~ Voluptuous Fairy greeting card
by Wendy Anne Klein ~

Ms Klein's website is here.

*** We are back up to 0 degrees today. The boys are back home. Everett and Scott have gone out for wood. Emil is practising his piano. I am thinking about washing dishes, going for a walk, working on a book project (the memoirs of a trapper), and tidying up the house before we get company.

Methinks the walk is most needed.

*** Reading an excellent memoir/biography by Vikram Seth, called Two Lives. Seth's Shanti Uncle, from India, married a German Jew and this is the story of their lives, their marriage, and their warm relationship with their nephew. Shanti Uncle was a one-armed dental surgeon and Aunt Henny lost her mother and sister in the Nazi extermination camps. Later, she was having trouble coping with the death of another friend, even two years afterward:

"Shanti once mentioned that when Henny first heard about what had happened to Lola and her mother, she developed a condition in which her skin was covered with small red spots - urticaria pigmentosa.
Now, once again, and with more profound effect, it was as if her body was succumbing to her grief and trauma."

I wonder if that was anything like what we called the hives I developed after finding out Mom had terminal cancer. Jeez, you think you're doing all right with such intense emotional turmoil, and then your body decides to put the screws to you too.

Do I have more fear, since Mom's illness and death, of what can happen? More awareness of the ugly possibilities? Less faith that things will turn out all right?

Yes.