"I just want to be wonderful"

I don't even think I breathed in 2012. Sold my house on California Drive after owning it for 10 years. Short Sale. Put most of my things into storage- what I didn't give away straight out.  Lived on IPA beer and Junior Mint candies for awhile, living in transit -- first in a hotel room in Palm Desert, then bouncing around until I finally landed in a small duplex in South Palm Desert in the vintage mid-century architecture neighborhood of Silver Spur. Where I am now. Just got home from visiting Tarah and Alex, who are now living at Fort Lewis, Washington, and expecting a baby boy in August. The cat soothes my lonely night, curled up by my feet. I've re-posted some older postings from 2010. I don't know why they popped up as being posted *today*, April Fool's Day 2013, but here they are, out of sequence but always right on time.

I'm wrapping up teaching a workshop for the nationally-based Memoir Project non-profit writing organization....the theme I'm working with as I facilitate a group of 6 wonderful writers is *suicide*.  I selected the topic myself I read for Valley Voices of the Muse this Friday, April 5 as the featured poet in Palm Springs. Saturday, I'm a featured poet at 100,000 Poets for change at a big, three-day international festival in Santa Rosa....I'm in the lineup with poets representing Grito Mujer, a women's rights organization.

Tarah is too damn far away. Every trip to and from Seattle fills my heart and then exhausts it as I return to stone-cold walls. I never could have imagined how hard living alone would be. I realize that I've only lived alone, really, until now, for short times. At 19, it was fun - for a short while. Now, living alone symbolizes losses and changes and 9.0 earthquakes in my personal life that I didn't ask for or want or even expect or have the capacity to conceive. So many rugs have been pulled out from beneath my feet in the past few years. It's a wonder I still stand. But I do.

Drinking green juice and playing with my house pets, and picking up my love for hiking again. I love teaching creative writing at College of the Desert this spring, as I did this past fall. Fabulous class. Great students. I weep at every invitation, even if some envelopes remain unopened. Thank you for thinking of me. Pass the superglue, the self-stick postage stamps.