Lindy Corman

My sister and I are having breakfast together.
I sit by the chestnut sapling

For the longest time, I took for granted the ingenious, surprising stream of presents my sister sent me, beginning in the 60s, when I was in high school and she, newly married, had left the East Coast, where we’d grown up, for Los Angeles, where she lived for the rest of her life.

My sister and I were the survivors in our family. We told each other, “We must stick together.”

I was pleasantly surprised! (See “Our Momentous Move – Part 1.”) My parents’ 20th century modern dining table looks fine in our 18th century, rebuilt-after-a-fire cape.

[This blog was written Wednesday, December 3. Its publication was delayed by ensuing moving mayhem.}

It couldn’t have come at a more fraught moment.

There seem to be no end of books about people dealing with cancer, but I haven’t heard of books about grappling with heart disease. Maybe that’s because, unlike cancer victims, people with heart disease die too fast to have a chance to write about it.

I check my email compulsively. If I let myself, I’d do it every five minutes to see if the small press that has said it would reconsider its rejection of my novel if I cut 100 pages has, having read my pared-down manuscript, decided, ‘Yes!