Finding Home in an Interstitial Space
June 27, 2024
I knew the house was an interstitial space from which I was certain, I could find my way home.
*An excerpt from my memoir in progress, Hard to Kill.
I knew the house was an interstitial space from which I was certain, I could find my way home.
*An excerpt from my memoir in progress, Hard to Kill.
Baxter Brown was a boxer dog. I didn’t know his name when he arrived on my porch one cold March evening about five years ago, but I had seen him before. He wore an ugly orange collar with the owner’s name and number roughly engraved on a gold plate. I called the owner. “Aw, just beat him with a stick. He’ll come home,” the owner said. “Someone needs to be beaten with a stick,” I said. “But it is not the dog.” I hung up and invited the dog inside, where he belonged. He was shivering and terribly thin, so
One of my earliest memories occurred when I was about two years old. My family lived near the town of Port Elgin, a small tourist destination on the shore of Lake Huron, in a two-story apartment. The apartment comprised the front half of an old farmhouse, typical of those one finds throughout southern Ontario, Canada. The farmhouse apartment had a stairway from the kitchen to the second floor. There were two steps to a small landing and about eight more steps leading to three small bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. A window at the top of the
“Looking back on the memory of the dance we shared…” Garth Brooks’ much-loved song “The Dance” reminds us that the best things in life sometimes lead to painful endings. The song is about a person who realizes what he would have had to miss to avoid the pain often associated with the end of a relationship. Today, the song was on my mind for other reasons. This morning, my s.o. Alan’s beloved Australian Shepherd/Border Collie cross, Topper, who’d worked his way into my heart to a degree I never imagined possible, crossed the rainbow bridge. He was 14, give or
It is okay not to be okay. This I have learned from two friends and my significant other who have lost children to terrible diseases in the recent past. I don’t know that anyone can truly “get” the enormity of the grief that comes with losing a child unless one has actually lost a child. However, I believe my friends and partner when they talk about how heavy that grief is at times. It sounds unbearable and yet it must be borne. People say the most insensitive things to parents who’ve lost children. More often than you’d imagine, people (and
This week my significant other lost his 17-year-old son–a cancer warrior. Grief is a suffocating, all encompassing emotion that I am just now realizing I know nothing about. My friend Michael, though, does know a thing or two about grief. His girlfriend, Colleen, who was also my junior high friend and track teammate, was murdered by an ex-boyfriend in 2015. Michael wrote the following blog entry sometime thereafter. I have found and continue to find Michael’s post one of the best things I’ve ever read about grief. Only now, though, am I turning to it for my own purposes rather than