Death everlasting

Where to put it?

Mom continues to haunt these parts, and it will ever be thus. I remember her mostly in her last days, which does not give a full picture and skews toward frustration more than is good for me. 

In the practical realm, we have a storage locker full of stuff she left behind. (Honestly, some of it is mine, but it's easier to blame Mom.) Photo albums, boxes of slides, bins of paper, camping gear, a collection of bibles and hymnals that only a Lutheran could love, college work by my grandparents (!), and more. I have, in fits and starts, culled a little (a very little) bit, and brought home what I thought I could handle. I even bought a bookcase to manage it. I can work at this for about one hour at a time before I get depressed.

Every inch is a storage space.

Pretty nice, I think.

Yours for the asking.

Free room and board and breakfast at the Plaza to anyone who'll help. 

That's all I have to say about that. 

*

On the bicycling front, I have for years resisted getting the kind of pedal/shoe setup that allows you to clip your feet firmly to the pedals, fearing that my sloppy ankle situation and generally accident-prone nature made it a bad choice. (For all of you non-bikers out there, the pedals are called "clipless pedals," but they most certainly have clips, so I don't get the name, really.) Now I've made the plunge. I have fallen a couple times -- coming to a stop and not getting my foot out -- but I'm getting better at the little flick of the heel that frees your foot, and it is a minor revelation -- it makes you more efficient, gives you more oomph per stroke. 

Some day, maybe, I'll be able to keep up with the big boys.

This metal cleat on your shoe attaches to . . .

. . . this clamp on your pedal. 

  

Here and there

Toilet convention in Sister Bay.
Agenda: New flushing standards.

Spent a few days in Door County, and another couple days up -- way up -- at our friends' cottage in Three Lakes. When you do summer things after Labor Day, everyone is gone and the rates are great.

We did our first actual touristy thing in Sister Bay -- assuming that going to Sister Bay at all is not touristy -- by signing on to an evening sailboat ride. We did not sail -- we sat while the two-person crew sailed. The boat was a ketch? Sloop? Cutter? I think it was a windjammer, if google is any guide. Two masts with big sails, a smaller foresail and a jib. Lots of ropes.

It's been a jerky-jerky summer, with its funerals and vacations. In recent days I came to crave my sad, quasi-productive routine. On a good day, I'm up by 7:30 or 8 -- late by working standards -- eat a little breakfast, comb through the Times, crab about the state of the world, and then sit down to write something -- anything. Whatever seems to be working. Then I do the actual paying work I might have, and when my mind punks out I organize my room, pay bills, and go for a bike ride. It's pretty good, and I'm grateful.

So here's a blog-related update -- I should have done this long ago. There's a new little box on the first page, on the righthand side. The label says: Follow by Email. If you put your email in that box, you'll get get an email notification when I put up a new post. Just in case anybody cares.

Here's the best single sentence I read in the paper this week:

"Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?" 

                                                                           -- Kamala Harris to Brett Kavanaugh 

I just wonder if, say, men telling women they can or can't get abortions isn't a little like some future government of women telling men they have to get vasectomies or that they can't get them. Reproductive rights! 

Kind of a grab-bag, this one. 

Gwen coils the ropes.

She smiles pretty well. Me, not so much.

Why you go to a funeral

So we went to Amy Lee's funeral in Atlanta Sunday afternoon -- me, Sisters S and K, and their husbands J and C. There were 600 people there, and it lasted almost two hours. Before the service, they showed pictures of her on a screen behind the altar -- in every one she was smiling. Her older brother Tim told us "16 Things About Amy" -- her way of saying "I love you," her hugs, her love of "every kind of cheese," her way of weedling back into his good graces when they'd had a dispute. Her friends and roommates submitted anecdotes read by the pastor. The whole service evoked her vividly, brought her to life.

We went to the reception and to the family's house afterwards. It was packed, and everybody talked talked talked and what's strange is that humor was such a part of it, even after the funeral of a 21-year-old college student. It's not just what Amy would've preferred, I'm sure, it's what you need to cope. It has happened at every funeral I've attended. The hard part, for her family, comes after everybody leaves.

The day before, Saturday, we ate breakfast at Fly Biscuit -- an avocado restaurant, you might say --  went to an outdoor book festival, saw a cooking demonstration, went to Victory, a trendy bar (heavily dosed popcorn), and watched the Michigan-Notre Dame football game at yet another bar. After the funeral, we made a 10:30 pm stop at a Korean restaurant for heavy appetizers. We are all in our 50s, and I'm older than that, and it was like we couldn't get enough. Life is short!

Message in a mirror
(Sister S's house)