Elise Matthesen

On Wednesdays, there was a highlight of my week: I got to have virtual tea with my mother-outlaw, Ruth. We usually chatted online via Jitsi for forty-five minutes or an hour. It was wonderful. She was wonderful.

Today is the sixth Wednesday without chatting with her. I'm going to have to put together something for Wednesdays, to have a Wednesday thing to look forward to. It would be a nice commemmoration. It probably needs stuff about storytelling and about science in it. I've got my thinking cap on.

Mike wrote "The Declaration" for us in 1998, and a couple of years earlier I wrote a poem for him. Every now and then lines from both of them float through my consciousness. Sometimes, though, I need to go back and let the words pass before my eyes one by one, in their cadences, taking the time it takes to reread something that he undoubtedly knew I would go back to, and something else where I was trying to tell him about time and eternity-in-mortal-time and all sorts of things that I could only say with those lines.

Tonight it was this:

One partner: I stand here with you because together we possess infinity in a finite space of time, and our combined reach surpasses the mortal.

Other partner: I stand here with you because we have seen in each other a shared task: and though the void may separate us, and matter must always fail, we shall never truly be apart, one from the other.

Together we take joint and equal command of the time still before us, to watch and to defend, to endure the cold and the fire, to stand until the last.
For against that power armies are as nothing, and Death itself comes begging and ashamed.

So please be aware that all the CN are in the tags, and here, have a link: https://elisem.dreamwidth.org/1306788.html