A Clean Slate

This spring, change is in the air. I'm reconsidering jobs, my artwork, and some of the baggage I carry with me from past sorrows. I need to lighten my load in lots of specific areas.

It was Easter yesterday. Easter a few years ago was the last time I saw the inlaws I loved when I made brunch for them. They're not dead, just dead to me. My adored elder niece inscribed a tribute to my cooking in multi colored chalk on the slate chalkboard I have hanging at the entrance to my kitchen. Grocery lists have come and gone on that slate. Notes of recordings and books lent and returned have come and gone. The lovely line from the lovely girl stayed.

I was told it wasn't my fault...exactly. It was the other folks who'd hurt them so much that they decided to close in to just the nuclear family, and shut out the rest of us with "we love you, but don't call us - we'll call you when we're ready." I ached to see them hurting, and I stepped back to give them the mental space they needed. I squelched my own hurt. But as days added up to weeks, and weeks built up months, and then to a year, and no word, the hurt festered anyway. I broke radio silence briefly last Christmas, when I sent them a cookbook I'd done of my traditional cookies, but got no response.

My blood family has long since died out. I have no progeny. The part of my late husband's family I loved has chosen to be dead to me. The wheel of the year turns to a new spring, and I've come to delight in and appreciate the generous love of friends more and more. And so I shed my last bit of reluctance.

I wiped the slate clean.