Happy Birthday, Craggie

Hello Carole and Craig!

Craiggie, I am trying to post the 'youtube' account set up for you but am having trouble. Hope to add:

Happy Birthday dear friend, and to your daughter who shares the day, I have the poem your father wrote, penned on a box after my sister died. A toast to you, Craiggie, and to those here, and here not.

Carole in Red

Carole I dreamed about you again last night, an 8-year-old sitter was watching your boys, just for minutes, while you looked for another but that wasn’t the significance of the eight. It was eight years ago that you left Miami and moved to Key West - and in another few months you’d be dead. In my dream you were wearing a red shirtwaist dress with yellow and blue circles, not quite polka dots, I remember the design, red with a few small yellow and blue circles, like bubbles, maybe the sky and sun with a red background for bleeding because you didn’t want to leave your young adult boys, they just starting college, you thinking families should be weaned by consent rather than poverty. Yet you found love with Craig, so maybe the red was for love. A few months after moving to Key West you’d die, officially of a heart attack, but I knew otherwise, we all did, especially Craig, whose love and warmth cradled you even as our father sharpened his knife.

Today is Curt's birthday and our 20 anniversary, both together, how practical of us. How sad to be without you.

Carole, Keep Channeling!

Hey Carole,

Keep coming at me .... we still have work to do.

“It was a dream,” Carolee emphasized. “But the dream was important. Because in another lifetime our sisterhood was cut short. And now we are sisters again. And there is something we must do. Something wasn’t finished, remains incomplete.”

Carolee related that dream years ago, and I remember it as if yesterday when the air between us vibrated with life. I cannot remember when she first mentioned the dream, only that it emerged into our world with the same certainty as the years we shared. Although I could not recall our dying together, I never doubted the experience, simply accepting that Carolee had retained our past. We both knew, too, that Carolee’s vision wasn’t a dream. She was the keeper of our history, a past that would again become our future. We will be sisters forever, and in the intermittent space between us, I now carry our story forward.
more later.

Love, Hope

With You

Hi Carole, your boys will be here soon, Passover and my birthday ... am so missing you. Have an upcoming meeting with a literary agent about our book ... you'd be proud.

Bermuda Shorts

You were wearing them, tailored Bermuda shorts, beige, with a pleat down the front and a wide leather belt, your hair shoulder length, maybe with a hair band. We together, in a hallway with pictures, maybe mother was there, too .... but you and I for sure, so natural, talking, walking.

January 3

Your birthday, you age 60, me 61 ... when again.

Love Mountains

Carole, we were together again, a few hours ago, maybe flying kites in a mountainous area after getting a quickie cholesterol check in a doctors office, against a broad rectangular wall, coming in from the outside emerging from a lovely tall wooded gate with scant flowers and butterflies painted on it, weathered made to look aged against a narrow staircase, the light grayish gate with a delicate character to it, maybe Asian, and I woke I up and cried and cried, still now in front my computer writing this.

Hanukkah 2009

Your boys were here tonight in this dimension as you were in another earlier this morning in a dream. You and I sitting across from each other in Nana Anna's living room, which wasn't her living room at all, a tea shop of sorts, but the the view, as I remembered it, overlooking the the woods. There was a Japanese two-some, two women our younger age at another table, each table a narrow short bench. Your brown silky hair fell below your shoulders and you nose squinched the way it did when exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It feathered your face and I didn't complain about the smoke as I would have then, wanting instead that moment to be whole and real and knowing otherwise, you my sister, a mirage?

Tethered. Wireless.

Oh, Carole .... these obsolete tears, grief unwashable. Seven years, however defined — revisions of home, dust and old thumbprints.

Airborne

I had the feeling I was in a cockpit, sitting at the rounded edge of my sister’s dinning room table, my feet on the floor. I could feel the phone receiver but could not see it, or my hand cupped around it. “We’ll meet on Lugo,” she’d said. My mother’s presence was evident, she mopping the floor, my mother never mopped a floor in her entire life!

“Not to worry about the kids,” I said to my sister, “they’re arses!” We’d laughed. “Mother, I’m to meet Carole at Lugo ….” Mother was grounded, in real time also died, buried, Carole airborne those vaporous letters at her funeral, and now me, clinging to a telephone cord.