It’s not raining anymore but it’s still grey. Finn, a friend, and I made a neighborhood circuit and now I’m ready to stay put and sew.

In another era, I would’ve called this quilt “done” a few iterations ago but this time I’m really enjoying adding little scraps. Balancing the red. Continuing the dark windows. I’m past caring if these add-ons represent improvements or not.

Not a great picture but what a tasty soup!

Here’s my version of Fall Carrot Soup

Make the chicken stock:

Boil a chicken carcass from a previous meal in a Dutch oven with plenty of water. Add: onion skins and ends from one medium onion, ends and peels from six or seven carrots, tips and ends of seven stalks of celery, ten cloves of garlic, rosemary, thyme, and bay leaf. S&P.

(The onions, carrots, and celery from above will go into the soup).

Make the soup:

Rough chop a medium onion and sauté with three cloves of garlic, as well as thyme, rosemary, oregano (except for the oregano, I used fresh herbs).

Add six or seven chopped carrots and three chopped celery stalks.

Ladle in enough stock to cover and then some.

Add two tablespoons of tomato paste and two teaspoons of fresh grated ginger.

Cook until carrots are soft and then using an immersion blender, make a puréed soup.

Serve with chopped dill and thyme, more salt, and a swirl of garlic-infused olive oil.

I probably would have added a tablespoon or two of heavy cream or marscapone if I’d had any in the fridge, but this recipe was delicious without them!

TL,DR: the pantheon is fucking up by letting my son die and DJT live.

Ariadne. Where are you? I’m lost. Or is your thread–cheat only for male warriors with an agenda?

Eros? Have you lost your mind? Every memory of my departed son is saturated with love, I mean grief, I mean love.

Diana, could you please get it together and take down the orange beast who threatens the well-being of all? No need to offer his head on a platter, just slay the fucker. One arrow. Please.

Persephone! I saw you there at the edge of the field of summer, disappearing in one fell tug. Hades must’ve grabbed you by the ankles. I wonder does the violent descent get easier with practice?

Does love, I mean grief, I mean love, get easier with practice? And what even is practice? It’s temporal. It’s repetition across time.

All practice leads to death.

Chronos. Have you anything to say about the merciless rigors of time? You say you’re neutral but we all know you pal around with the Grim Reaper.

Why is that bloviated menace still alive while my handsome son with the gracious smile is not?

Maybe stumbling clueless through the labyrinth is the better way to go – every bruise informing the next direction. Go left! Bump. No, go right!

If Hades can steal a youthful girl for a season of rape, why can’t he kidnap an 80-year-old man and dish him some of his own medicine and by his own medicine I mean, of course, rape?

I thought you gods were into retribution, just and unjust punishments, and hungry sexual predation.

Just ask Leda. 

I swept dead leaves from the curb in preparation of this week’s storm. Heavy rain carries debris from the roadside and deposits it on the storm drain down the street. The innocent flow of water down the hill will create a lake if it’s clogged and if there’s a lake, there’s a good chance water will seep into our basement.

Some storms you can prepare for. Others, merely witness. 

To be present while one’s child, craftily and in mute despair, marches to his own self-inflicted death is a torture that I wish on no one. 

Well, maybe one someone, except that sick someone is so very without heart, I’m not sure that if his namesake offed himself he’d even care. I mean, the fat turd didn’t even attend the kid’s wedding.

Penelope wove and undid and wove and undid, sitting at the loom of worried expectation. She didn’t know if Odysseus, her somewhat scurrilous, conceited husband, would return.

When you read the epic poem knowing the outcome, the waiting seems trivial. We forget: she did not know.

Same with all those movies set in the early 40’s in France and England with a neighboring monster on a eugenic rampage. They did not know who would emerge the victor.

We did not know our son had bought a gun. We did not know he would really end his life. We worried and listened to the wind. We offered words of hope, delivered plates of apple slices with cinnamon.

He was having none of it. If he was Theseus, he would’ve run with unerring accuracy right into the maw of the monster. Go right! Yes, now go left!

That monster had been dogging him for years.

Sweeping up dead leaves is one thing, offering pumpkin bread and hugs to a high school friend of your dead son is another.

“We were a lot of us desperate,” he tells me. He tells me, “I went to Denver and I called and I called and he didn’t answer.”

This young man, now the age that my dead son will forever be, is getting married next year and even though I’ve only just met him, I want to be invited.

All the passages now foreclosed to our second born.

How do you even name your new circumstance? “Raised two boys. One of California, one formerly of Colorado.” That’s one new bio. That damn word count!

When the rain gets heavy this weekend, I will pray for my boy. Pray that he rests in the shelter of his own expanded self. Pray that the suffering he so doggedly encountered in life, has fallen away, leaving him pure essence, pure intelligence, pure heart.

America is dying by suicide too by the way.

So go ahead, put our dear leader’s name on the Ford Theater and then maybe by some mojo or other, he’ll share Lincoln’s demise. Can I even say that here or will some Palantir search engine find me and take me down?

Ask me if I care, Athena, but perhaps lend me your shield.

I’ve signed up to get her daily poems. It’s a treat every morning to open up my email and read her words. This was from this morning (recall that she lost her son, Finn, to suicide some years back).

Dear Heart,

I remember those months 
when you were naked, 
when the pain was so great
and you were so tender
not even the flimsiest

slip of protection would stay on.
This was how I learned
your true state—
raw, porous, vulnerable—
the only place in which love grows.

How did I ever think
I could protect you from pain?
Why did I ever believe
that that was the goal?
As if breaking is not inevitable.

As if loving doesn’t
always involve a flood, 
a drought, a drowning, 
a dearth, a blessing. 
Now, no matter how many 

layers I try to wrap you in—
there is no not knowing
that your emptiest, loneliest, 
places are also worthy 
of love. 

Now, I have learned to be grateful
that even when I wrap you
in an armor of busy-ness
or coats of competency, 
you are always naked underneath. 

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I bury comfrey leaves in the dusty soil under the holly and next to a hellebore. It is an act of faith, but also a ritual informed by grief for look how dry and pale the soil is, even after a weekend of rain.

And, as if such a calculation mattered, I wonder which is bigger, my grief at all the injuries to the natural world or my grief at the passing of my younger son.

Does one grief nest inside the other like two Russian dolls? It can’t possibly be that neat. More like the two griefs permeate the air, the yard, and my body in undulating waves that cannot be measured or even separated one from the other.

I listened earlier to the parents of a young man stolen on October 7 and murdered some 300 days later and though the circumstances of our boys’ deaths have nothing in common, our sorrow is the same.

“I am broken,” says the mother. “And I will be broken for the rest of my life.” They feel their son near. The father says he thinks of him every minute of every day.

I too am broken. I too think of my son constantly – more, in fact, than when he was alive, which is some contorted form of irony.

I have regrets they will never have. That is one of my burdens. The regrets come and go like the sadness: unbidden, unwelcome, excruciating,

Why didn’t I talk to you more in those last two weeks? Why didn’t I ask you to tell me why you thought life wasn’t worth living anymore? I picture myself patting the couch saying sit for a minute and putting my arm around him for what could’ve been the last time.

The nitrogen–uptake capacity of the comfrey makes it ideal for composting. You can make salves and teas and poultices as well, but this year I plan only to bury its leaves in the garden beds.

Is there anything I can bury near the barren patch of my being that might at some later date afford growth?

Today, I doubt it.

But I will gather chive, thyme, and rosemary from their pots and chop them up to make herb butter. Lemon zest, salt, and garlic for extra flavor. The act signals belief in sustenance ahead. There will be tasty dinners down the road and some above average snacks. That there is a reason to harvest aromatic herbs even when swimming in grief offers me a droplet of satisfaction. No more. No less.