Dangers at Work and Spring in General

It's spring, like bare legs and skirts spring. Finally. Thank god.

Work is full of dangers, like the way upgrades in OS's mean that all the Greek characters in the neuromechanics book I'm editing are GONE. Just GONE! This is a physics of the body book ... so you know, variables, math, formulas, et al. A problem. Quite a problem. If only we hadn't sent it to the author yet.

I think this is the anniversary of my great-grandmother's death. I think so. Or else it was yesterday. She died at 98 in 2002, but I didn't see her death coming at all. She was 80 when I was born, so in my head, I think, she was just old forever and would be alive and old forever. It was hard explaining to friends how close I was to her. We lived a block away from her until I was five, and were with her all the time even when we moved five or ten minutes away. She died of congestive heart failure and gangrene. Who honestly dies of gangrene? It was so awful, so terrible -- this woman of grace, this woman of style.

Oh Nana, it's spring, the bulbs are blooming, my neighbors have geraniums like you did, and I can't stop thinking about your daffodils that you couldn't keep up with anymore, how the bulbs needed splitting and since no one split them up, their orange heads would be three layers full, their yellow petals all flush and rampant. How that beauty was a kind of disease that shouldn't have been there at all.