When you’re a woman, you can count on at least one thing—you’ll spend a good chunk of your life-giving advice. It’s like we’re born with an invisible sign that says, “Tell me your problems, I’ll overthink them with you.”

Homesick for Heaven

My writing muscle is a bit weak these days. Much like working out my abs or, God-forbid my butt, it’s a use-it-or-lose it scenario. I have found that the less I write, the less I am able to get words out of my head in a conversation, much less tap them out on a keyboard. How does this make sense?

Time is such an illusion. Revisiting memories feels like yesterday but forever at the same time. It’s sad when you can’t pick your babies up anymore. Or hold their hand.

Judge if you must, but what I learned from this unplanned experiment has changed my perspective on a lot of things. First of all, if you really know me, you might be thinking, “This really isn’t that much of a stretch, she wears black all the time.”  TRUE. However, I have never repeated the same outfit every day for a month. As for my favorite color, a few years ago I saw a meme that read, “I’ll stop wearing black when they make a darker color.”  I seriously wanted to hunt down the person who wrote it, because I was convinced, we had been separated at birth. 

A few years back, I was in a bookstore and stumbled upon a book called The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way you Are by Dr. Kevin Lehman. I read this book cover to cover in one flight from Phoenix to Columbus, Ohio and concluded that Lehman was a genius. But then again, I was always looking for some kind of reason or justification as to why I was different from my sister, or anyone else in my family for that matter, and Lehman helped prove my case.

Tuesday and Wednesday were really the pits - lower than low and I don’t know why. It’s been 27 days now and it seems like yesterday.  Maybe there are just too many unknowns, maybe because of not having closure with Don's death certificate, or maybe just because I am lonely. 

It’s Thanksgiving again.  But, how?  I say that every year as the holidays roll around, staring at the tiny calendar numbers on my phone in disbelief. Where did the year go? Heck, where did my life go?

I’ve always been a big believer in the power of the love and the moon, and the goodness of humankind. The order of the three of these tends to shift around, depending on what’s going on in life or in my heart at the time.

There’s something about fall that’s undeniable.  But it’s much more than the change of seasons, the shorter days, and all the pumpkin spice.  The equinox and the harvest moon usher in an internal “knowing,” as if on a symbolic level, this is the time to harvest what we've been tending to over the seasons in our lives, whether several months or even years.  

I have always wanted to be a writer.  It’s like breathing to me. It wasn’t that I was inspired by the idea of seeing my name on the cover of a romance novel in a tiny airport magazine shop, or the thought of sitting at a 6-foot pop up table, signing books at Barnes & Noble.  Instead, I was inspired by “knowing” what was in me.

I have never really liked my hands. I have short, calloused fingers, wide palms, and messed up nail beds from a nail-biting stint when I was in grade school. Add to it the effect of knuckle-popping which I became obsessed with after I saw the cool kid on the block do it in second grade. But nonetheless, I’ve always referred to my hands as looking like “dog paws,” versus the long, graceful hands that my sister has, and I always wanted.