It Begins. Apparently.

I think I may have successfully rewired myself, but also kind of accidentally.

This past weekend was spent going positively wild with Chopstixx (a local place), pizza, and hot dogs.

“Going wild” here meaning “I ate this.”

It made me sick. I’m not sure if it was an accumulation of grease or not eating well at all, but I was very nauseated by Saturday night, and it shocked me, because that didn’t used to happen. I mean, I used to eat like that with no consequence, and we get Chopstixx (five dollar lunch specials!) a lot. Maybe I caught something and just had bad timing with eating. Either way, I steered clear of the deep fried foods when me and fiance went to the NC State Fair on Tuesday.

So I guess that’s how we’re gonna do things, then. Protein, veggies, and fruit. I’m fine with it, honestly. Those things taste good, and are food.

It really all put a little more emphasis on how much I want to switch to being as natural about things as I can.  I’m running low on shampoo, but I have a ton of shampoo samples that I can use while working out the best natural stuff (also so I can clear out my cabinet.) My biggest motivator? I just lost my grandfather last month to cancer that grew slowly, over years, until it infested his whole body and took him from us three weeks after it was discovered.

I want to be healthy, but health is more than being increasingly faster on a run. It isn’t the treatment of a symptom; it has to be about the whole body, and I really believe that includes the stuff I never thought about before, like makeup, shampoo, and toothpaste.

I am truthfully, pretty excited. It’s like realizing that I breathe a little easier (throat is less sticky) when I run in the rain. (Am I a frog? Oh my word guys, I’m a frog….), and I like feeling better overall. I don’t really know if making mascara in my kitchen will have any benefit other than not involving a grueling removal process (looking at you, Great Lash), but knowing what’s in the things I’m putting on my face and brushing around on my teeth sounds pretty great. Call it paranoia. I just call it fun.

Hey, maybe I can make some cute packaging for it all. I love packaging.

Who Are These People?

One time, in college at Bob Jones University, I saw an odd sign on someone’s door. Or maybe a residence hall bulletin board. Either way, the message was weird and went against a lot I’d been taught. It said “Jesus saves from the American Dream.”

Which struck me as strange because my grandparents lived it. Not the impostor American Dream, of owning more things than you know what to do with. I mean the real one. Three meals a day, in a modest house that you built, and healthy kids. I don’t know how it mutated, but my grandparents are pretty inpspiring.

The message was very odd, because the wording would suggest that God was somehow against personal responsibility and hard work.

I didn’t set out almost twelve years ago to write any books. I was a freshman in high school struggling with passing algebra and dealing with the trauma of having curly hair that wouldn’t be all straight and shiny and swingy. Dashing off a throwaway imaginative story for English class was how this business all began.

I’m not saying that my story suddenly got awesome, and it still isn’t. Writers learn and grow. Life is pretty much weed and feed for the stories we make up.

Back then, amid the failing grades and the major hair insecurity, I never thought that heritage and family histories would be as part of the book as they are.

I guess I never really thought about my ancestry all that much, because I didn’t care, and I’m still not certain I do all that much. Ancestry.com wasn’t free, so I wasn’t interested. All I knew was that my family might be maybe English on my Mom’s side and whatever else on my Dad’s side. (I’ve taken to using the term “pirate,” just for accuracy.) FindAGrave.com and NCLive are limited in how much help they can provide, because a standard, correct spelling of their surname wasn’t a huge deal to my family back then.

Growing up in a house that stressed individual responsibility was probably part of it. Who I am isn’t determined at all by people I never met.

Which is why it was odd when I was asked what my ancestry was, as if it somehow mattered. I mean, it’s a fun curiosity, sure.

So how’d something I only see as a fun curiosity get to be such a big part of Riddle? I can promise you, it’s not some inspiring message that I put in there on purpose to teach people. It grew organically, and kind of just showed up one day, doing its own thing.

Cool.

Oysters on Boxing Day

On December 26, every year for as long as I can remember, it’s been a tradition for me, my parents, and my brother to have breakfast at my grandparents’ house in Virginia. It’s the whole works, of course. Eggs, bacon, sausage, my Gramma’s biscuits with grape jelly, orange juice, coffee, and and a big plate of fried oysters that my PaPa would get and cook for us. They’re good with ketchup and I have chewed them carefully since I was a kid, on the off chance that there might be a pearl inside.

This year, I don’t know.

Last week, my PaPa passed away.

Gramma and PaPa came for a short visit, for a wedding, actually. Three days later, he went to the emergency room because he was losing a lot of fluid. Even that afternoon, he was smiling, even though he was in more pain than I knew then. By the next Monday, words like “palliative care” and “hospice” became a reality as a PET scan revealed the real horror of the situation, how far disease had really spread.  

This year, September 11 didn’t have me posting pictures of my country’s flag on Facebook. My fellow Americans will have to forgive me, because that day, I didn’t care all that much.

Instead, I stood in the local hospital, holding one of PaPa’s hands as he crossed a bridge that we couldn’t follow him over.

And after. After I kissed my PaPa one last time, after I moved out of the room to let his sisters see him, watched the men in suits appear and wait politely down the hall with a red gurney, and after we walked down to a teeny waiting area so they could begin the final journey…it was a little easier to feel calm. Not coldly logical, but knowing that he’s not hurting anymore. That he’s with my uncle now. That one day, death will die.

Nothing I could do but get my purse, go home, figure out lunch, eat. Go running while my fiance went to class that night. Holding down the fort while my parents went up to Virginia the next morning to make the arrangements. Cleaning the yard and the house on Friday. And finally, Saturday.

It was easy enough to rush into the house to dress, scarf down a quick lunch, and hurry to get to the funeral home.

Life after the service ended up being harder, at least for me.

PaPa was everywhere. Not so much in pictures, but in the things he left. On Wednesday, his watch and glasses, his shirts I’d washed. Pants hanging up on the bathroom door. On Saturday, a pair of shoes down in the basement, a coffee mug. A truck and two cars.

Just there. Like he’d stepped out for a minute. Like Gramma should have been saying “Pop went up to the store for some chicken. He’ll be right back.”

Gramma is living with us now. She’s gone back to their house for a couple days to go through stuff, to pack it up. They were married for 66 years. PaPa was 18, she was 17. I think she assumed she might be able to go back there for good, but her words to my mom last night were “I gotta get out of this place.”

I knew she’d live with us if anything ever happened to PaPa, but it turns out even a reasonable idea that you can accept in the daylight hours, when everyone is healthy…even that can be abstract until you’re faced with it.

The hardest part is not hearing PaPa reply “I love you too, honey” in his rumbly voice with that southern Virginia accent. The hardest part is my mind screaming at me throughout the day that Gramma is here and PaPa can’t be and won’t be ever again. The hardest part is the horror of absense.

I don’t know what Christmas will be this year. Sad, for sure. A little emptier.

I don’t want to say anything trite here about pressing on, and being strong. I wouldn’t say anything like that to someone else. Part of my world is gone for a while.

Just a while.