Author: Vivian Bikulege

‘Cause time is the worst kind of friendAlways there till you need it, then gone in the endOh but love is stronger than it… – Georgica Pond – Johnnyswim

      To be at the edge. It seems we exist there without even knowing it. The next step, a leap, a dive, a fall, an escape, an exodus. Maybe it is the brink of success or failure, the fringes of health or sickness, or the boundary between life and death.

Don’€™t be afraid of deep places. – Matthew Kelly This past Christmas, I visited my brother’s family in the Upstate with my sister Stacie. It was the most time I have spent in a car with my sister in forever. We were carrying out Santa’s good work by delivering our gifts and experiencing the love in receiving.

I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich today. I am going to a book club and members are invited to bring a sack lunch to eat over conversation. I love peanut butter. I love jelly too, but not grape jelly. That is what is in the refrigerator. It was my Mom’s jelly.

I do not know where I came from . . . For I do not remember. – Augustine of Hippo, Confessions It is raining in Nova Scotia. I am in Havre Boucher, a small fishing village in Antigonish County, camping at Hyclass Campground, site B13. There is a bathhouse and laundry, a playground, a couple of outhouses and a rocky point of land jutting into St. Georges Bay. I am warm, dry, writing. Hyclass. High class. It is all about perspective.

The cord grass is turning green. The seasonal shift was always part of my conversations with my mom as we crossed over the Woods Memorial and McTeer bridges. Was.

Evacuation A teddy bear made out of my dad’s golf shirt. The ceramic bride and groom that topped our wedding cake thirty years ago. Jewelry. The crucifix that hangs in our bedroom. Our wedding album. Our wedding picture. My dad’s painting. His felt hat. Documents. Passports. Cash. Checkbooks. A few framed photographs. One packed suitcase. My mother, her suitcase, her medication, her safe, her wheelchair.

“Don’t let her go to bed on her thoughts.” – Sage advice from my neighbor DianeJune could have behaved a bit better in her introduction to the summer of 2016. I’d rather blame the month than blame cancer, the medical community, or God. June will come and go and she will not linger in any need for forgiveness. A good thing as I am not in a forgiving mood.

On a quiet Wednesday night in a New Jersey hotel room, I rediscovered Dan Fogelberg. My niece was texting me with YouTube videos of Troye Sivan “sipping waterfalls” in Youth and James Bay singing a directive that none of us needs to wear a Best Fake Smile and “you don’t have to care so don’t pretend,” when I harkened back to what I was listening to in my twenties and I thought of Dan and through the technological magic of Pandora and iTunes, I stepped back into his music and a past life.

Remember the book, Conversations with God? In it, Neale Donald Walsch asks questions and God answers. I think I perused it, never bought it, and I have my own questions so I wasn’t incredibly interested in Neale’s dialogue. However, in the waning days of 2015, I heard the word “oracle” read in church.