In the Spaces

A few weeks after my novel, Widow's Walk,  was released I was visiting with my neighbor, Cecile. She was c urious  about one of my first published books, WomanChrist, and asked if I had a copy. I did. It was a second-hand Amazon.com copy, rather battered, with a sticky-note inside the cover that read:   “Cheryl--yes, this book is Really weird! (I had no idea when I bought it 😊 ) But bear with it—she has a lot of good ideas about being a woman today while also being Religious. Hope you enjoy it— (it’s not just to skip around and browse through)!!” Cecile might get a laugh out of that, I thought. Her reaction after reading the book was, “This is your best book! It’s so current. How could you have written this all those years ago? It’s actually prophetic.” She was the first one who told me to republish it. It had been written on my very first computer, more like a glorified typewriter and neither DOS-based nor Windows-based. I had only the published book; if I intend

I    Have Always Been With You Artist: Shiloh Sophia WIDOW'S WALK, A NOVEL · FRIDAY, JANUARY 5, 2018 A sense of loss followed me like a shadow all my life. Real loss. Actual dead and gone kind of loss. Maybe it’s like that for everyone; who can know unless they tell you? From early childhood I knew I’d have to do something about this haunting or it would eat me up. There’s an old 16 mm film of me as a three-year-old circling the tiny grave of a bird that died--a tiny yellow chicken that my neighbor Minnie Osborn gave me from her coop. I’m performing a kind of ritual, like a priest circling the altar with incense. You can see the tears on my cheeks. As life goes on we lose a lot of who and what we love, those people and things that make us what we are. Maybe every experience of love continues as a part of us. Maybe we are made of the bits and pieces of the content of every moment we’ve lived--all we’ve seen and heard and touched and smelled, every gaze, embrace,