Out of touch

I feel some need to check in on this thing and mention why I have been silent for so long...so here is the quick update, for all of those of you who are listening (reading). My life is in a huge fog. It's under renovation. I have a cold. My child has snot constantly coming out of her nose and she screams when I try to wipe and/or pull it out so she can drink her bottle. My cat died and now I have a new cat and a new apartment...I just moved in but my landlord is already asking if I will renew the lease in August. Damnit, I DON'T KNOW!!! (The emphasis on "I don't know" should be seen as general.) Snow is general all over Ireland (Ithaca), falling faintly and faintly falling. I can't seem to get my poems published even in little lit-mags I had never heard of, and the poems I do not think suck (that is, they do not suck and are not of suckage...not the ones I am sending out, anyway). I feel a constant sense of panic. The snow does not come down vertically but is all floaty in the atmosphere and zinging around sideways. It actually, today, looks like it's snowing up out there. Well, I don't blame it. I'd go somewhere else too if I didn't have a huge desire to just go home (temporary home) and never go to work again. So...my life has braces on it. Does your life have braces on it? Is it a debris zone? My new cat is nice and her name is Lily. I found a handful of tiny little scraps of paper yesterday where I had written down, over several years and during phone conversations, stories from my grandmother's life. Since she had aphasia, the order of the stories is interesting and a bit random but I can still hear her voice in them. Splashes of humor, pieces of songs I don't know the rest of ("by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea..."). I wish I had asked her more, but I didn't have patience. Well, now I have patience. I have all the time in the world to sit here and be here on earth without her and think about what she left me--the scraps, the floating snow, the grief, the being here uneasy with all of it, that's all for now.