For the winter is passed. . .

'The texture, so precious, of any given day is the texture of perception. Anyone's will do.'

This comes from The Love of Impermanent Things by Mary Rose O'Reilley from St. Paul, a book I cannot stop reading. . .you know the kind that causes one to lose track of time, stop, ponder and copy the gems to a journal, and rave and recommend to anyone who will listen? In her midlife 'memoir' she says:

'The mystery of what's remembered and what's forgotten seems either portentous or random. Which is it? I turn over a potsherd here, a fragment there--the archaeology of memory--trying to make a single ancient pot that will hold together and tell me who I am, who anyone is.'

Do check out this title.

Do you ever think of writing a memoir? My family is/was very colorful, these hard-headed Calabrians and Alsatians. I've been reluctant to spill the beans until everyone is gone. . .but I'm not getting any younger myself! How about a fictional account -- my mother's family history would certainly make interesting reading; her dad walking off the farm one day never to return. [Sadly she waited seventy-three more years for the mints he said he'd bring her when he left for town.] . . .her mother's depression, struggling to feed her three children from her garden and the weekly free hog's head from the local slaughterhouse. The workers were told to 'cut a little deeper' because the Miller kids were coming for the head that day. The Italian side was from the other side of the tracks due to hard work and planning, and I guess, different tragedies. Their first born of seven died in his first year. My dad's 'seizures' and propensity for angry tirades with knives against his mother made him the least favorite of these chronically sad immigrant children. You can't make this stuff up!

That's for another day.