That same day Shelley stopped to watch the funeral, she saw a woman standing in the newer part of the cemetery, where there is no shade from the baking sun. The woman looked middle-aged, her reddish-gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, arms crossed over her chest as she stared up at a bunch of birthday balloons tethered to a headstone. Once again, someone had gotten knocked into next week and someone who loved them was left to wonder why.

Lil

A funny note from a hundred years ago.

Dear Miss Lil,

My Girl Scout project is to help you quit smoking. If you want too. If you don’t Okay. I love to dance.

Lisa

ps) I get a badge for making people not smoke for being a good neighbor.

“A little emphysema,” your father says, “is like a little arsenic or a little bullet in the head.” We all know I need to quit smoking, but I would argue as I have many times that the very cigarettes that are trying to kill me now might have saved me so many other times. Or that’s the way I see it. I never felt alone with one between my fingers, moving back and forth, a cloud of smoke to shield my face from others, a cloak to make me invisible, like something Becca’s girls were talking about from a book not too many years ago. I could hold a whole glowing fire at the tip of my fingers, and then so easily and powerfully I could put it out, under the grinding heel of my shoe or the flow of water, or into a bucket of sand.

October 24, 2016
Southern Pines

Sometimes I feel like a big antenna, circling and turning and picking up static and signals from others. Perhaps it is the result of seeking my mother, and how for years I thought I saw her, a face in the crowd, a woman at the top of an escalator or turning a corner and then gone by the time I got there. I have listened and watched for her, and now I am much older than she ever was. Isn’t it odd the way my mother will always be 34, that all these times I have felt her presence, that is the person I see.