If you’re going to make the past your present, be prepared for a lifetime of dust...

Death is not something you get over. It’s the rip that exposes life in a before and after chasm, and all you can do is try to exist as best you can in the after.

I am one of those lucky marvels whose husband has banned them from the kitchen, the last and now permanent ban was during an Everton Three (door slamming on hand) when he’d lamented, in a crazed manner to no one in particular after my failed tomato soup experiment, ‘She’d burn air, so she would,’ accompanied by wild pacing around the tomato splattered linoleum.

Living on the water took away the boundaries created by land and custom and introversion. Without fences and driveways, the water provided a constant thread of connection and dependency.

If you're going to make the past your present, be prepared for a lifetime of dust ...

… real life hardly ever unfolds the way we’d like it to, not like in a story.

We need stories in order to understand ourselves, for good or bad, to be inspired or horrified, it's how we cope with being human and how we decide what type of person we will become.