Just because I can’t remember always, I sometimes read old chats or emails from people I no longer know, and it always feels a bit like looking at the ceiling from a very hard floor that you’ve just hit. Keep having to re-orient my brain, and I marvel at how many things I’ve reclaimed from the wreckage.  

Good research for a novel, I must say.  Writing isn’t as fun as it used to be, but I’m also not as bad a writer as I used to be. I can’t wait to be 40 and look back and laugh at how terrible I am now, and show my daughters some of my old diaries.  I think I will have a lot of good advice for them, but they’ll laugh, in the end they will have to make their own mistakes.  In these fast-forward memories of the future, we always live in Ross and Ruth’s old house in Redlands and it is always so beautiful there.

I wish I had a picture of that house for you with the long driveway and the mountains behind it, the small tiled ante-room with 60 years worth of desert glass clinging to the shelves. The antique farm sink in the wash room and cold deep freeze filled with hand-cranked ice cream.  The dove hutch with the faulty latch, and the railroad you could ride in next door, and always kittens at every corner waiting to be caught and held.