Ten Years

4.6.23

Ten years ago this morning, Scruffy was snatched away from us, from me, in the most abrupt and unresolved fashion. Much has been written about the surrounding milieu in my other blogs, Travels With Stevie and Possum Family Singers, won’t go on about it much today.

Nothing is as it was in the Before Times, and that includes what we called 2001. Those days when we basked in pointless travels and imbibements and musical amusements with friends, dear and otherwise, was long gone long ago. I clung desperately to the shell of it all, until that crumbled, too.

I spent the last ten years in a fog of loss, circling a drain that seems to be clogged. I lost seven dear people to the great beyond by the end of 2017, and several more went silent. Grief does that to people and friendships. It gutted my social sphere and upended my daily existence. The unfriendliness of friends, the walls and barbed wire and empty storefronts of my former life, all this is commonplace and felt by most people now.

Not bitter, just exhausted, searching for a unicorn under this pile of manure. Throw a little hay over it, a few months from now, it will bloom with pink mushrooms.

By the way, I hear Betsy moved to Norway. You go, girl.