There will be feasting, and dancing, in Jerusalem next year

I sent the link to the collage piece I wrote in June to a friend tonight, with the disclaimer that keep-this-chuck-that works out better in metaphor than in real life. Few know that better than he.

Thing is, there are plenty of things I'd love to throw away and can't. And when I write, I'm sometimes paralyzed by a desire to tell the truth, the whole truth. A good finished piece emerges when I sit around with the scraps of my life long enough to know what that is, and how to arrange it, what truths are not relevant to the matter at hand. Sometimes the truth is so big and so hard that I don't know how to begin to assemble it, and it takes up space and I don't know what to do with it.

These are the pieces I'm going to share right now:

My mom died in July.

She was 54.

I moved into a new house when she was in the hospital, and sedated, for the last time. I had mono while I was moving. I never got to show her pictures of the house. I'm taking care of her cats. One of them is 11 years old; he was born when I was in high school, and I remember when he fit in the palm of my hand. All his life he was nearly feral, keeping a safe distance, rarely in the house and hiding when he was, watching you with his half-wild nearly-gray green eyes. Now he's deaf and arthritic and otherwise falling apart and for a long time terrified to leave my room. Every breakthrough he makes breaks my heart -- not just because she's the person who would care the most and because I can't tell her, but mostly.

Mom shared my ridiculous memory, and in particular, she fetishized dates. On long car trips she would ask my brother and me to tell her a date -- we couldn't specify a year, just a day, but she'd tell us something that happened that day and on what year it happened. On October 1, 1980, she told my older brother we'd put up the Halloween decorations when the baby came. I was the baby. I was born on Halloween.

And once, we nearly got thrown out of the grocery store for punching the Brawny man -- as in the fella on the Brawny paper towel package. It's a surprisingly satisfying thing -- the paper towel rolls offer just the right amount of give and cushion. And she started it.