We Are Family

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There we are with our shoes off. I’m not sure of the year, but this picture was in the 1996 journal.

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Himself: Bounded home from work, bounded through his walk, bounded through dinner, and was done for the day…….poof. Asher: Thank you all for the prayers. Surgery went well. His gall bladder was impacted by the cyst and had to be removed, and he is now resting well. Everyone seems pleased with the outcome. Me: Today...Write, swim, write, poetry group, sew….or sort of sew. Reading: Too Many Magicians Balance: The stunning clarity of the air. You could see forever.

Dogged. That was me yesterday, dogged. I whipped through that last volume at light speed only coming to a brief halt when it dawned on my that my family pictures may now be scanned, but there’s more waiting. By the album, actually. Mother’s stuff. G’s mom’s stuff. Endless images waiting for me.

I got the last of yesterday’s project all done. Volume 1, 1974 through Volume 35 in 2001. What an amazing amount of stuff. I’ll be nice and not call it crap. I saved every card, every letter, every fortune cookie fortune as well as writing every day endlessly. Today I don’t think all that ephemera was worth saving or recording. But there it all is, and if it was loose I bagged it neatly.

You would be proud of me.



Top: The Querida….which means beloved or darling, the boat Bob’s owned when he met my mother. Bob was mother’s third husband. Bottom: The Meg-A-Bob with mother and Bob on the flying bridge. The Meg-A-Bob was a Monk designed 50 footer, and mother loved her.

The last volume to get scanned, and the job of scanning the journals was not done in order, was 1996. There was the baby Mohave, there was G’s mother fragmenting before our eyes, and there too were pictures of my stepfather and his boats in his last year of life. There are a thin, fried Marie and a thin healthy Lenora. Best of all, there is G, beardless, at work, at play, and often with Aaron when he was small.


Bob aboard the Meg-A-Bob. The colors have changed so much, Bob is orange and the sky almost black. Mother didn’t have good luck with husbands. She divorced number one…he decided he didn’t want kids. Number two was my father. He was an over educated, fall down drunk. Number three was Bob. He was a cruel man as well as a drunk.


G and Aaron in 1996.

I made a conscious decision many years ago not to explain. I never explained my first husband to my kids. They love him. So be it. The kids blamed me for the divorce. Still do. I didn’t explain my feelings about Bob to my kids, they liked him, I truly disliked him. His own kids hated him. He wasn’t just a classy gay drunk, he was a cruel, mean man.

When I finished this giant scanning project, I put all these old albums, and these old thoughts, away in boxes pushed toward the storage area letting them go. After lunch and a bit of a read in the sunshine, I ripped out seams in the red quilt for the third time and fixed the worst of my errors. Fixed a few more too, and while I was at it mended a few seams that were coming apart in the bedroom quilt.

No one ever said I could sew a straight seam just that I could scan.