Loose Threads

Yesterday Warren had an afternoon rehearsal (followed that evening by a concert) in Mansfield, which meant I had a lengthy block of time in which to read and write.

Reading I did. I finished off Bootstrapper, a painful, thoughtful, hilarious memoir by Mardi Jo Link. It is appropriately subtitled From Broke to Badass on Northern Michigan Farm and is about divorce, poverty, and scraping by. 

But the writing? Sometimes I just can't make the sentences flow coherently no matter what. This was one of those times. Three starts, 400+ words in each time, and...nothing. The topic would bog down and I couldn't salvage it. Or the next one. Or the next one.

Sometimes all I have are bits and pieces of thoughts. It is not unlike opening my well worn sewing box and seeing a sketchy layer of snippets of threads from prior repairs, some still threaded through a needle, but all too short to use.

So here are my loose threads, in no order chronological or otherwise, from my afternoon and my blog attempts:

• Doug's wonderful memorial service and the many layers rippling out still from it
• Effigy Mounds
• Dinner in Rochester with my longtime friend Tani and her partner Tom (Tani and I go back some 30+ years)
• Decorah, Iowa, and wondering where that little gem has been hidden all my life
• Mayo
• Mayo
• Mayo
• A vivid prairie sunset
• Realizing there were still plenty of tomatoes in my garden 
• Being on campus at the University of Chicago and realizing we were in the middle of the freshman arriving on campus
• Remembrance Rock (Carl Sandburg's ashes are under it) 
• Crossing the Mississippi River three times in one day
• Making a sour cherry pie with my dear sister-in-law and savoring every bite (our husbands, brothers, do not eat cherries in any form, which baffles Margaret and me, but leaves more pie for us)
• Super Dawg
• The iconic red barn set against the autumn trees 
• Nomadland (Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century) by Jessica Bruder (If you are reading only one book on the continuing economic wreckage of modern America, this should be it) 
• Taylor, my "other" son, getting married yesterday midday
• Making it home Wednesday evening before sunset and Rosh Hashanah began
• Gifting a piece of art—one that I love so much that Warren said, with surprise in his voice, "you're giving them that?"—to someone I love and knowing it was the absolutely right present

And that is enough for now.