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Musings on Lost Mothers

 My mother died March 24, 2024.  I'm having a hard time processing that, I guess.  It is only starting to hurt.  When I was little ("like a number approaching infinity, say, 6") and not so little, but younger (30), I could not imagine a world without my mother.  To consider such a place and time was unbearably painful.  Yet, here I am.  And, often, it saddens and confuses me to say, I don't feel anything.  More, when the loss was new, I am ashamed that I felt relief.  I was her caretaker.  I wasn't all that great at it.  She told me so regularly.  She told me I was a disappointment.  She told me I lacked compassion.  She was sad and lonely and she wanted me to split my soul open and share everything with her.  She wanted me to satify her needs for connection and give her the opportunity to mother me in my distress.  "Ann.  Why are you so unhappy?"  I think I tried at least a few couple times, but i...
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The Antidote by Karen Russell

 I am here to depsit the first time I drank a strawberry soda.  Mountains of ice and underneath a greiny pink slush, a taste like what I imagined kissing to be.  The fizz rose to my brain and I heard God and God said: order a second strawberry soda, Bertie.  I never want the memory of that first drink to fade.  When I'm an old man and all my senses have dulled, I want to taste my twelfth summer again-- The Antidote is a prairie witch.  Maybe you are like me and haven't run into a prairie witch before.  Maybe after the WWII they all retired.  But a prairie witch is a person who absorbs the memories of her clients into herself and stores them.  The client is thereby freed of the memory but can collect it back at any later time- so long as he retains the receipt with the identifying number.  Sometimes people want to bank special memories to relive later (see above) but, more often, they want to forget something horrible, painful, and, parti...
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The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

 I was REALLY hoping this would blow me away like the first Olivie Blake book I read: Masters of Death   .  I think that dream probably hurt my appreciation.  I found it hard to get into at first but by the end, I was aware that I needed to read book 2.   The characters all possess pretty amazing magical abilities.  Two can manipulate the physical world, one can read/enter minds, one can read/manipulate emotion, one can see energies.  I most enjoyed the naturalist.  Plants communicate with her.  They LOVE her.  She is TIRED of them.  "She wanted literature, and, more important, the freedom it brought to think of something that did not gaze at her with the blank neediness of chlorophyll,"  "She had mentioned once that certain types of English lawns had a tendency to be excessively entitled."  I guess I expected more independence from organisms that can synthesize their own glucose....
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Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

 ...art is tragedy.  Art is loss. It's the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes.  It's the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It's him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he'll be specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now.  This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you've always understood that.  You've always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain. Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.  It seems like it's the right shape but it's slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are tranasformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don't even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones. What an appropriate passage t...
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The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

 ***WARNING*  FREE FLOWING TRAIN OF THOUGHT RUNNING OFF THE RAILS BELOW*** Why was I thinking that a book which on the cover bares the comment from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (why in all caps?? Why no possessive 's??) "Chilling... This one is a keeper for horror fans." would be the fun-filled, humorous romp of Danny Dragonbreath or Harriet Hamsterbone?  Noooo.  While I was still harboring such expectations on page one when I read that uncle Earl owned "The Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy" - calling to mind both "Eyegore's Curiosities and Monster Museum (note - with an apostrophy) in Cawker City, Kansas (best known as home of the "Largest Ball of Twine") and the wedding/reception of my friends and neighbor's Dave and Mary (in what now must no longer exist- because I've searched for it and for it's name recorded for posterity -  but was a little white wedding chapel and taxidermist in Fayetteville NC). ...
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Queen of Shadows by Sarah Maas

 "I feel like I'm one wrong move or word away from leading them to ruin.  Peopl's lives- depend on me.  There's no room for error" "You'll make mistakes.  You will make decisions and sometimes you will regret those choices.  Sometimes there won't be a right choice, just the best of several bad options." "What do I do now?"  They were gone...     "You light up the darkness." I'm not a queen.  I'm a mom with a child with special needs.  This is my life.
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Kingdom of Ash by Sarah Maas

 Don't bother yourself with what-ifs.
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