February 14, 2016. Candies, hugs, warm arms ....

Another Valentine's Day without you... a box of Russell Stover's underneath your picture on the mantel, those old thumbprints; the poem you wrote to Donna when her first husband died, and then she gave to me ... the difference is that you are not lifeless, not mute rather forever present in the years without time.

http://www.extralove.com/carole.html

Untitled

Revisions of home.
Books on the mantel.
Chair of ten years.
Dust, the old thumbprints.

Not unusual,
this life after death.
What connects all things:
either habit,
the daily routine
that binds two people
when one is gone

Or an energy
the survivor sits with
in a dark corner talking;

the spirit struggling
to live through all it had known,
until even
these pieces of furniture

seem drained,
no longer practical?

Answers never come.
Accomplishment
the acceptance
of this fact –

then the slow beginning
of nothing familiar,
changes that had never
stopped coming,
distance and its evidence –

until like a dream of a woman
being pulled back,
unable to continue running,
the memory rolls over
gently, lifeless.

Carole Leslie Marcus, 1977

January 3, 2016

HI Carole,

January 3, 1950 to January 3, 2016 ...

Route 66, the path without solid ground under our feet.

Happy Birthday my other half ... two Russell Stover's with you on the mantel, one a doggie tin, the other a genuine after holiday ... our silly glee in finding.

January 2, 2016

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and tomorrow ... your picture on the mantle ...  love you always

Halloween 2015

Hi Carole, had the sweetest dream about us, maybe college age, we under the trees on the sumpland behind my house that is being gutted for houses.

That reality brutal, I still can't imagine it even as one lot has been cleared— in the time of of sea rise— land permitted without drainage, the greed and arrogance stupendous.

Yet under the trees lovely, the shade of them. Not sure how many will remain after, maybe none.

In the dream, you won a scholarship and we were so happy, at peace. There were children in the dream, sitting in the shade with us, that perhaps hopeful.

Two years ago on this day in real time, we had major flooding. Images are posted on Pinecrest Floods http://pinecrestfloods.blogspot.com. I worked so hard to get the land reclaimed, restored. Preserved.   There is an image on that site of the very spot we sat.

Now, trying to reconcile the dream of scholarship with the lowlands and its bounty, the beauty of nature, even marred after its desecration but still vital and now again trashed, no thought to keep it as green acreage, a floodplain for the pumps ahead.

You and I together, in another place — perhaps a parallel universe — twined time — before the dystopia to come.

Not so spooky

As if I doubted ....

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/science/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky-interactions.html

Einstein was deeply unhappy with the uncertainty introduced by quantum theory and described the implications of quantum theory as akin to God playing dice.

But since the 1970s, a series of precise experiments by physicists are increasingly erasing doubt — alternative explanations that are referred to as loopholes — that two previously entangled particles, even if separated by the width of the universe, could instantly interact.

The new experiment, conducted by a group led by Ronald Hanson, a physicist at the Dutch university’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, and joined by scientists from Spain and England, is the strongest evidence yet to support the most fundamental claims of the theory of quantum mechanics about the existence of an odd world formed by a fabric of subatomic particles, where matter does not take form until it is observed and time runs backward as well as forward.

October 19, 2015, from Danny: Sunset @ Key West

Photo: Daniel Abril

(Click on image to enlarge)

I'm back. Yes, I'm safe. 

It was gray and dreary the whole ride down, then as soon as I hit Key West the sky opened up and it was beautiful. 

I arrived stress free, with time to spare before sunset.   

I threw the flowers and said a prayer.   

Counting backwards: October 19, 2015 to 2002

Hi Carole, my dear sister, love of my life ..

I've been placing  boxes of chocolates under your picture on the fireplace mantel, buying after Xmas and Valentines Day holidays when they are on sale ... as when we used to gift ourselves and each other.

Celeste took one maybe two months ago, I didn't notice it missing, who'd ever consider swallowing?

She announced that it was stale and I said it was for you and she said that that you must have eaten it.

If only,

If only ...

Oct 18, 2015: Reading and writing via a transformed sisterhood

Hi Carole,

Lots of recent media about Narcos series re Netflix, a streaming video company, and upcoming movies about the Medellin drug lord years.  Netflix before your time and I am not watching the series, way too painful, the recall of our cocaine addicted father tossing the daughter whom he would later claim to have loved the most: his youngest daughter flipped to hide his habit. All his grit and scum because you were on to him, had worried about the father who would pitch you like an old pair of shoes.  God, how I miss you.

PS: Danny = Key West tomorrow, a fine kindred spirit. Truly lovely even as he may not believe or see it yet.

PSS: Josh says our book has a King Lear theme but no way like that.  Think time bounce, we as kids between Mother's tomatoes and what comes later. Mom's sections are hilarious! You'd be pleased, would do a much better job ....

FBI Tea Party. Is a few few days before Oct 19 ... 2002 - 2015

Hi Carole, always with you, imagining how much fuller our lives would have been. Must be grateful for what we had, still have in a changed sense, mostly tears. Other have it worse is what I tell myself.

Just getting back into us, have spent all summer with Pinecrest Floods. Last two floods were last two weeks of October. Getting treated by Pinecrest the way our father treated us, screwed. FUCKED. Should be used to it.

Hurts.

Found a Senate report from 1988 referred to as  Kerry report. Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy. Pages beginning around 42 eye poppers, stuff I'd forgotten or never knew, relates to the Barbara Trent movie we saw ... will work some into our story.

Boys are doing OK, at least they have a place that needs a new roof!

Love and miss you.

XXOOXXX

Ubiquity

Hi Carole, 

I didn’t post this to an NYT article,  a grief so deep it won’t die,  but am so overdue in writing, my thoughts here:

It has been 13 years since my sister died, she 52, I theoretically 18 months older but in reality we sloshed in the same womb blood, sharing.  There isn’t a day that goes by that my longing for her is greater than anyone understands. No one does, my extended bereavement isn’t normal a close friend says but who is she to judge? 

I had died the year before during a horrific surgery and perceived timelessness, the space that isn’t actually time because there is no beginning or end, rather a magnificence — a unison wisping into and out of, the void as we join the universe.  Void isn’t the correct descriptive either because within it there is movement and sound, an intangible flimsiness solid in its being. In scientifc terms, maybe the entanglement physicists refer to, and in that way we are tethered and shall always be.

Your poem: eloquent. 

Before Stars

Before there were stars night was an eyeless staring
with nowhere to look leading into, unmapped by any chart

and always losing itself. Because of this, women were born,
formed from the faces of candles, gasoline lanterns, or

kerosene lights, with nothing to see looking onto,
and which night knew nothing about from its distance.

Then came their flames rising like points from their
blind spots, forming stars, which night looking out of was seen

seeing women.

Carole Leslie Marcus