the rose of kiev

I will probably never blog here with the same faithfulness that I used to. However, that does not mean that I'm not writing. In fact, I've started a small business: (Thanks to my father for designing the logo) The business is simple: as my website quips, it's "designed to preserve the irreplaceable life stories of people in written, audio or video form." You see, my grandmother passed away a year ago this month. And, as I have previously posted, I am (very slowly) working on a book-size project that snapshots my family in the weeks around her death. But the timing of her death led to this idea for my business. You see, she died before I could really sit down with her and record her life stories. We had even planned to do it the summer before she died, but it didn't work out. I regretted that deeply when she was gone. I want other people to be able to keep their heritage, their inherited stories, and I don't want their possible lack of time, equipment or s...

Several reasons. First: I've become an obsessive drafter. I have many ideas at various levels of conception in my blog cache, and I've only satisfactorily completed and published a fraction of them. Second: Graduating from college has snuck up on me, and it has included things like exit counseling for loans and repayment plans and figuring out how to take care of health insurance. It's a bunch of strangely adult and dead-dry boring tasks. Third: The past three weeks in particular have been devoted to a new writing project, something I'm hoping to put up here in chunks as it matures. When my grandmother began dying May 10th, I immediately began to take careful notes. She passed away the following Sunday, and I continued to take notes until long after my family privately wept over her urn that Friday. The project will be book-sized, and it will be an attempt to photograph my Dad's side of the family in that two week period. There are three motivations to this project:...

Dave and I padded down the seven cream-carpeted stairs and joined the rest of the grandchildren around the TV. My brother and cousin Jake had eyes riveted to the screen, elbows extended, thumbs a blur: the Boyer competition had already been aroused in a James Bond video game. My 17-year-old sister lay sleeping on the pale yellow-and-blue striped couch, long brown hair concealing her face and the shoulders of her wine-red cowl neck sweater. My youngest cousin, Libby, was abosrbed in the smaller screen of her pink and heavily-stickered PSP. This down here was our sanctuary before dinner, we 6 of the 9 grandchildren, when you count Dave. Unfortunately, I knew I couldn't hide for long in the basement. As the now-married oldest granddaughter, I had fallen in a gap where I was no longer a child but not quite an adult. But it still meant that I had to go upstairs. It was a pleasant surprise to find the kitchen a well-oiled machine, my father videotaping as my uncle and father shuffled a s...

The Holiday Season has been progressing in complexity during my life. The first 14 years were the simplest because we simply shuffled between my dad's family (a special version of laughter and tensity) and my mother's family (the bigger the gathering, the more step-relatives I never knew I had). Complications increased when my parents marriage ended, but after 8 years of that schedule (Christmas Eve in Mansfield with mom, then back to Columbus with Dad for Christmas morning) we had finally adjusted. And then I went and got married and threw in a whole other family on top of it all. This was Dave and I's first year negotiating what, in my family, is already an area of extreme territorialism. Yeah, there were a couple fights. In the end, my gracious Dave volunteered we spend Thanksgiving with my father's family. For the first time in a few years 3 of the 4 children were going to be at my grandparents' Akron home with most of the grandchildren, so I called my Nana to t...

In her life, my grandmother has tried many tactics to get the love she longs for from her family.  She'll throw a fit at my brother's ballgame to draw attention.  She will show up unannounced on doorsteps.  Many Christmases I've received a set of "Thank You" notes under her tree.  She is generous; and often that generosity comes with fine print.  She works very hard in all the wrong ways to get the affection she's so desperate for. All my life she's been like a woman holding a handful of water, not understanding that the tighter she grips, the more drips away; rather than having more control, she only has less of it to hold. My grandmother is an intelligent and well-read woman who has been in church almost every single Sunday of her life.  I have no doubt that she's read and heard and been taught the story of the prodigal son many times.  And I wish so badly that she could've really listened to it and heard what the story had to say about who God i...

It's going to be SUCH a great Thanksgiving this year. I don't get nearly as excited about the turkey holiday as I do over Christmas, but this year it's going to be wonderful chaos: my aunt Sharon and her son Brian and daughter Libby, my Uncle Scott and Aunt Susan and their son Jake, and then Dad and me and Natalie and Erick all squished into my grandparents' Akron home. Will there be blood and carnage? You better believe it. But am I TOTALLY revved for this thanksgiving? No doubt about it. That's what makes this thanksgiving SO worth looking forward to and bearing interrogation and hiding in the bathroom away from my grandmother - Brian will be there with me, my best bud, my long lost identical twin, my brother from another mother. He's the one person who can incite me to troublemaking, and boy can we get into it. I completely forget that I'm a legal adult and go at it with him in everything. I talk with him on the phone in the bathtub, and there have been s...

my grandparents are in town this weekend, which meant I got my usual hour-long verbal scouring of my life and the panicky attack of tiny stressed out screams after the interogation was over and they unbelted me from the metal chair under the dim lightbulb. I swear, all they haven't done is given me a labatomy and search my brain manually. my mom is getting married in January to a guy she's only been dating for 5 months; my best friend Tabby is engaged to her boyfriend after dating him for 6 weeks with plans to move in with him after the new year. it's been a crazy couple of weeks discovering these fascinating tidbits from everyone, and reflecting on myself and my boyfriend ...could I do the same thing at this very second ? He and I have been dating a little over 4 months, and I can't even conceive marrying him or anything of that nature within the next year. It just doesn't compute - flatly. So why do my mother, who's literally f%#@ed up every romantic relations...