The longer I don’t post here, the worse I feel, and also the harder it is to post.
Bsp has been on the road. In Canada for a week, enjoying family, projects, and delicious vegetarian food (a mezze feast here, vegan pizza here and a Rajasthani thali here). And some non-veg pastries, the best of which were pillowy donuts filled with the lightest of cream fillings. Incredible dining.
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One of the projects was typing up a handwritten journal we found in a box of family items retrieved from the trash heap in Kansas. A diary my mother wrote when she was 17 years old, a handful of double-sided lined loose papers that covers only half a year or so, but it’s an engagingly immediate piece of writing, of her crushes and friendships and desires, her frustrations with the nuns who educated her -- and alternately, her desire to join the sisters because romance and life sometimes felt so difficult. She adored music and listed bands and songs that touched her: The Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Animals.
I never knew this Mom of course. I feel such a nostalgia for her. How could this vivacious, witty, petty, scheming, big-hearted, fun-loving teenager know that just a year later she’d be unexpectedly pregnant with me, and hastily marrying the father, a guy who never even appears in the journal?
As we draw closer to nineteen years since her passing, I am beyond grateful for this gift of my mother.
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