Missing My Mom

I put together a jigsaw puzzle this week (1000 pieces, not huge, but still challenging), and I thought about my mom a lot while working on it. She loved puzzles and was very good at them. We used to do 1500 to 2000 piece ones in the basement of our Illinois townhouse while watching Creature Feature movies. It's one of the few activities I have tons of patience for. When my ex and I had the big house in Huntington Beach, my mom and I occasionally did puzzles on the dining room table, since we mostly ate in the kitchen nook. Here, I have a good-sized table, but I also have Inky who likes to grab pieces, so I devised a protection method: I covered the puzzle with a bath towel every night and weighed it down with books. Any stray pieces were gathered up for the next round of puzzling. The system worked out well and no pieces were lost or mangled too badly from little kitty teeth. Tonight I dismantled the puzzle and taped up the box to keep everything nice; I will most likely donate it to the holiday auction later this year.

On September 11, 2001, my mom was over at my house while I got ready for work. It was only the second week of my new job, so I was still anxious about being on time or even early. Mom used to take the girls to school to help me out. She liked to have the TV news on while she waited, so we saw the planes hit the towers. It was incredibly freaky, and I didn't know what to do. I called my husband, who was always good in a crisis. We decided to carry on as usual, so I went to work, and my mom took the girls to school. That's all. Everything has been said by others over the years, and I have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation, only memories of my mother. After a while, memories of loved ones are the most significant takeaways... then the mental snapshots blur and fade until all that's left are vague traces of feelings like a hint of perfume wafting from a drawer.

We've had wall-to-wall news coverage and social media posts about the assassination of an influencer for the past two days, eclipsing the 9/11 memorial articles, which spurred me to deactivate my Bluesky account. All social media is a colossal waste of time, but at least FB keeps me connected to friends, and of course now I have my wonderful online book club there. Instagram is a continuation of that. Reddit is amusing, and the dating horror stories make me so happy I am out of the chaos, plus there are loads of cat pictures. But Bluesky is just filler nonsense ~ I could be reading a book instead. I should be reading a book instead, since my TBR pile grows faster than I can keep up... I've only read four books since the start of the month! Tonight I added another one to the pile because my Kindle told me I was up to 300 points, so I cashed them in and bought a book. Sigh.

I used to consider blogs to be another form of social media, but I think that depends on the individual blogger. In the old days, I definitely used blogging to socialize online. I craved views and comments, and I was always visiting other blogs and commenting, hoping for a quid pro quo. For years, I enjoyed the interactive prompts and related blogging activities where the purpose was to tag others and be seen. It was a lot of fun, and I even ended up with a few good poems to keep. But I grew tired of it and felt my writing had become devoid of meaning because I was just churning out stuff to keep up with the latest prompts. I quit for a while, experimented with other media, and ended up back here at Blogger where I started. I don't get many views and comments now, which is fine. It actually works in my favor, as I don't feel obligated to blog daily in order to keep an audience entertained. I do what I want!

I'm keeping my Substack, since I do enjoy perusing some of the longer essays and stories there when I have the time and inclination (not daily though). My intention was to add a bunch of my own poetry to my page, but I haven't done much with it yet. Maybe I will; maybe I won't. It's nice not to stress about any of this these days, as it's ultimately not that important, unlike, say, finishing a PUZZLE.