Dear Carole,
Your birthday, January 3.
The image from the holiday, 2025. New Yorker cover is titled is "Remote Control." Is a gift to Danny. You'd have loved it. Trump with his sticky fingers. Fraught political times here.
Always loving and missing you.
Carole Marcus Abril
January 3, 1950 - Ocrober 19, 2002
The joy and ache forever. The missing ...
Image: Danny Abril
October 19, 2025
Key West
Hi Carole,
It's September 29, 2025 and your forever good-bye anniversary is approaching. Dreams of you have begun, faster and faster, more and more. The most recent several clips in one, you stepping out a car, your legs, calf down. Don't recall now the ones preceding it, several at once with you, laughing. Maybe located in the parking area of my old old Boston basement appartment from our college years, just a sense of. Half a century ago. Fifity-plus years ago, how can that be?
Life a finger snap, the memories never ending. They grow into you.
Am listening to: yourclassical.org, streaming music through the firepelace mantle speakers, Phillip Glass from the movie, The Hours.
That was the last book you recommended before you died.
Hi Carole,
This would be the time of year we'd be a year apart, you in Januarty, me in March. We'd giggle about it. You are not here yet you are, and shall always be for the rest of my days.
We celebrated the holidays this year ten days after Curt's lung surgery. And the teriffic news is that today, January 2, we learned he is cancer free!
Love and miss you dearly.
OH Carole,
Positively amazing!
The line outside Josh's Fookem's Fabulous Key Line Pie this morning. He was open a few hours earlier today, Thanksgiving.
A true "happening!"
Carole,
We visited Josh in his Fookem's Fabulous
Key Lime Pies shop last Friday.
Coconut Grove.
You'd be so proud!
I was blown away!
Hello my dearest sister,
Two days late posting. Today is October 21. Time does that. Years pass without you and I never cease wondering how much richer, fuller life would have been be with you by my side. It aches to imagine.
You continue in dreams and are forever in thoughts.
Josh has opened a physical Fookem's Fabulous Key Lime Pie Shop; a spot in Coconut Grove! Celeste, Curt and I plan to visit him there this week.
Danny is in Detroit on a video assignment. Pays for his travelling, seemingly he's been all over the world!
Hello Birthday Carole,
I dreamed of you the other night and awoke in tears.
What reminded me of you was Miguel, my grandson whom you never met because you died three years before he was born. He's nineteen, was home on winter break.
There is something familiar, a kinship about him that triggered thoughts of you. He has your trait of laughter with a spontaneity and glee. We laughed and giggled all the time he was here. His exuberance evident, funny and crisp.
He carries a touch of you and my dream-state recognized it. In that sleep, I was sitting on the ground in front of a desolate home garage with faint circle-blur spots staining its white trim. And perched on the roof, a female weathervane pointed toward the heavens.
I woke up tearful with longing and remembrance.
Hey Carole,
Sister Love
of my life,
yearning,
missing,
dreaming of you.
Video with Key Lime Pie Vending Machine
Well, not sure if video will load ....
but below is a screen screen shot from video.
Mall hosts Fookem's Fabulous
Key Lime Pie
PLUS link to Forbes article:
Julia & Henry's: This Miami
Food Mall Delivers Sublime
International Flavors
Writing class prompt: June 2023
The call that change my life
The call that changed my life came in on October 20 at 9:42 AM. I was in the kitchen, the phone on the wall, its long coiled cord like a huge banana curl nearly reaching the floor.
I wore pink shorts and a tank top, ready and grateful for a bike ride ahead. The year before I’d had a 50-50 chance following a grim surgery and now could peddle through the neighborhood.
Hello, I answered.
I heard my son’s twenty-one-year-old voice. Mom where have you been?
Been here, I said, left the phone off the hook, you know Nana calls all hours of the day and night …
I’ve been trying to reach you since 2:30 this morning.
2:30 this morning?
My body instinctively tensed. Time diffused.
Mom, Carole died.
Carole, my sister Carole?
The sister who could expand mythologies, explore the hidden power of inanimate things, extend them, make them malleable, turn them inside out. And suddenly — whish — a beginning appeared bright and alluring renewed by a fresh perspective, her words transmuting the order of the universe. She with a knowledge that preceded our birth.
That sister, the love of my life?
My sister, Carole?
Gone?
*
I dream,
and dream,
and dream, of you
as if we
were infused.
Oh Carole,
You would have loved it! Was like our 1960's Boston college days, a troupe of stoned happy adults. Plus familes, people of all ages, seemed like the largest crowd in a decade, thats what Danny said anyway. We had an outside table at Greenstreets .... compliments of the boys local friends.
The pics will show some. Wanted to add more, have a slew of them but for some reason they are not loading. One float was a celebration of Cconut Grove's 150 birthday. This year's theme, "The Queen is Dead, Long Live the King," honored a new era. With Gov. DeSantis at the helm, we'd better watch out!
Below: Nancy, Josh's girl, Miss Queen Bee from a Save the Bee's entry.
Hello my dear sister Carole,
Your 73 birtday, we a year apart now, a year and eons.
I placed a fresh box of chocolates under your picture on the mantel, twenty years since you've been gone. Gone is comphrensible, you not part of this present, away – twenty years is not.
The hum-drum numb grief of emptiness continuing without you, ache and tears an acceptance of this fact.
*
You'd be proud of your sons, both keep busy. Danny with his video work as well as his immediate need for a plumber. Josh continues baking and baking his key lime pies. We celebrated Josh's birthday this year on the actual date of it. Was also the last day of Hanukkah so we combined both. Had a jollygood evening.
*
The above composed last night, before midnight, posted minutes later when your birthday arrived. In the hours between, I dreamed of your exuberance, inquisitiveness, the fun we shared. Your laughter. In sleep we were together again, in a crowded small store jammed with "stuff." One of us, most likely you, tried on a pair of form-fitting colorful plastic jean-like pants, white colored with an artful background. I'd thought how odd the pants were, the shiny, sheen texture of thick plastic.
In retrospect, perhaps not so unusual. Most everything passes – breath and thumbprints. Birthdays. Agony and loss until both do we part.
Oh Carole, how you are missed.
Carole on Extralove.com
Hi Carole,
It's Celeste's birthday today, she working, we celebrated last week.
I've been with a cold. Just awoke from a nap, dreamed of you, about 15-years-old. A smallish silver-gray satin chair was being delivered to you, the fancy kind placed in front of a dressing table .....
My dear daughter and sister on a day together.
October 19, 2022
MY dear sister, tweny years gone. A lifetime of love.
January 3, 1950 to October 19, 2002
Carole Leslie Marcus Abril
Hi Carole,
Another Yum Kipper without you and my tears are streaming .... listened to Ravel's 'Pavane for a Dead Pincess' and cried even more. i remember our listening to it together and how excited you were to have discovered and shared it with me all those many years ago. Decades now.
Yom Kippur blew over us this year, Curt's pacer replacement one day, then the next Hurricane Ian on the West Coast ....
MIss you my chereised sister ....
PS: Actually, the kids don't buy into the mythology anymore, and what i miss so dearly is the hoopla, the party, our sisterhhood.
Graduating Grandsons!
At Nana's and Curt's home. Pulling images from messages because don't know how to access photos in phone from computer ....
Miguel's 18 birthday, plus high school graduation.
And William's 5th grade graduation.
Celeste, Miguel, William with a college gift for Miguel.
 |
Above: Miguel, Celeste, Melissa |
Next Up: William's 5th grade graduation, June 7, 2022 .... Nana could not attend at Coral Reef Elementary, no room, each household was given only two invites ...
 |
| Daddy Sam and William |
 |
| William, Nana and Daddy Sam. Image by Curt.  Minus a good pic of Giselle, but here is her arm petting Sam's new pooch. Welcome Tigger! |
Happy Birthday, Carole.
Generous, kind, creative. More than a loving sister – my other half.
