Going back through one’s camera roll can be treacherous at the best of times. We might feel nostalgia or regret or find ourselves acknowledging that time passes. We are all mortal. But to go through a camera roll eight months after you lose a child is a hellacious quagmire. Even avoiding Boulder and holidays and graduations there’s no escaping the loss.

Case in point: for one job application (the Parks Service?), Danny needed to provide proof that he’d been diagnosed with ADHD. I took screenshots from academic intervention papers and sent them along. There are IEP’s, 504’s, psych evals, letters from neurologists, follow-ups on medication, occupational therapy notes, and on and on. I made a point of also sharing the screen shot showing his IQ. It was 135.

I was surprised by the descriptions of his behavior in the classroom because it included humming and grinding of teeth, which I don’t remember at all.

But I certainly remember how hyperkinetic he was, how driven by movement. Sometimes he literally bounced off the walls. We learned at some point that swinging and doing flips were self-soothing for people with sensory integration issues, which put a bunch of his passions into perspective. 

I remember a time when Danny went on a sleepover with Cary and the friend‘s mother called me at around 10 to say, “He won’t stop doing flips off the top bunk. Can you come get him?”

Classic Danny. I found that flip-at-the-lake photo (above) this morning.

To be faced yet again with how much struggle Danny endured — years and years of it — made me sad of course, but it also reminded why he couldn’t hang on, which is weirdly relieving.

I mean, imagine having an IQ of 135 and not being able to sound out basic words in third grade. Imagine going through high school with that much intelligence and being relegated to the dumb-dumb classes.

In one of his suicide notes Danny wrote, “after a lifetime of restless doubt and anxiety, I just don’t wanna do it anymore.”

In another note Danny thanked Ken and me for a happy childhood and added, “I know I was difficult.”

Yes. Yes, you were Danny. And how we loved you anyway!

I will soon share some of Danny’s writing from last year where he talks about how important skateboarding was to him and why. And also why, after breaking his left arm twice, the loss of it was so, so devastating.

Context: too many pictures and a refusal to pay for more cloud storage. I’m on a photo-deleting rampage. I’ll download them all to an external hard drive this afternoon to take some of the pressure off.

Note #1 to self (just back from the MFA, where the gift shop did me in) — avoid Christmas displays. Especially darling ornaments.

Note #2 to self — Triggers are everywhere. That nature show about tigers that you thought would afford distraction? Ha! When Mama Tiger lost two of her cubs to a ravenous male, I had to leave the room.

Yesterday, after weeks of assembling colors and patchworking new houses to enlarge this piece, I stripped it down to a central column and called it done. What a relief!

The initial section was OLD. I wanted to revive it. Turns out just adding a little more sky and a base of interest was enough.

It was feeling so oppressively NOT fun.

Not sure what I’ll do with the various half-done houses but for now, I’ll focus on backing, quilting, and binding the original.

My hunch is that by freeing the unfinished areas from the original section, they’ll be able to find new life.

There’s a lesson in this — a fairly obvious one, I think. Something about letting go when repeated effort just leads to more frustration.

Thank you poll workers and people who tirelessly canvassed. Thank you to the folks who phone-banked and who are curing ballots even as I type.

Thank you reporters and others who kept us informed (Aaron Parnass, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell to name just five).

THANK YOU VOTERS!

Thank you first-time voters, thank you voters who waited in line for hours, thank you voters who had their drop boxes closed on them, voters who had their polling places closed on them, voters who were supposedly gerrymandered out of having a voice. Thank you Black voters, Hispanic voters, boomer voters, party-switching voters, and young people.

Thank you, Beto O’Rourke and Stacy Abrams.

Thank you district court judges and lawyers who held the line, followed the law.

Thank you Trump for being so epically stupid as to put Paxton forward as a candidate.

Thank you Ukraine for bombing the shit out of bot farms in Russia.

Thank you friend Lisa for being tirelessly involved on the ground for years in North Carolina.

Thank you Pete Buttigieg.

Thank you folks who wrote Postcards to Voters (including me!).

Thank you for generations of activism and sacrifice by Black Americans. Thank you Black women for always understanding the assignment.

Thank you to the voters of Ohio and Michigan for seeing through the hateful rhetoric.

Thank you to the preachers not only for winning previously red states but for embodying what Christianity should look like.

Thank you to Rep. Garcia for his two word announcement last night: “Lawyer up.”

How the petunias hold onto their color in this year of your death! Improbable color, vitality a surprise in the time of frost and the coming dark.

I look at them in mild wonder, a shallow but palpable appreciation in the season of firsts.

The day after tomorrow? Our first anniversary without you since you were born. Our first anniversary since you died.

We will get take out and stare at a screen and try not to notice how impossible it feels to continue without you.

The yellow maple leaves drift down and land with a soft crinkling sound onto the deck. You can’t see or hear leaves falling anymore, not here, not anywhere.

Each leaf falling signals its place in the natural order. There is nothing natural about your absence. No order or sense in it.

Very soon it will be full dark and another day without you will come to a close.

Sometimes a project presents the question: continue or bail? I have less patience for self-torture these days.

Roof lines — I struggle with them. And this color collection is doing my head in. I’m going to keep going for now but the question “why?” hovers. To make matters worse, I’m hand-quilting a baby blanket with no known recipient and it’s taking forever.

This, however, pleases me. Using sheers and thin silks almost like paint. All these fabrics take a needle nicely too.

If I edit out the middle blue, I might like it better (below). We’ll see. There’s an elephant in that upcycled blue shirt square and since I’m thinking about memory, I’m a little attached to keeping it. Elephants, of course, are well known for their prodigious memories and their care for and remembrance of the dead.

Two of these fabrics, I purchased in Longmont right after Danny died.

Jude, if you’re reading this, after seeing your nine-patch mask, I went hunting for this photo of white supremacists. Couldn’t find it but did locate a digital collage using the picture. Creepy, eh?

That guy on the left.

We had two trick or treaters last night. TWO. Somehow that made me sad.

Today’s signs? A white butterfly just now out front and earlier a female cardinal perching on the exterior living room windowsill intently looking at us.

And this alphabet drawing just spilled out of an ancient CD sleeve that I was about to throw away.

Waking up at 5:00 (after the clocks falling backwards) means I’ve been up since 4:00. That’s okay. After a walk with a friend, I can curl up under my electric blanket and watch TV and sew. At least until the Patriots come on.

Hope your Sunday is peaceful. Soon we will be on the other side of the midterms.