I wasn’t ready for Grief. She was ready for me. We had been walking side by side from the moment Peter was diagnosed with BVFTD. But when he finally passed away, I expected to be sad.

I didn’t expect grief’s paralysis.

I still imagine my grief as a sixteen year-old girl. A wisp of a person, dressed in white, living under the branches of my hydrangea tree. I can see how she would like living there, under the forked branches that hold last year’s robin’s nests.

In January, I finally rolled out of my bed and stepped onto the cold hardwood floor and just realized that I really was alive. That I really had something to live for. No. I wasn’t that level of depressed or unhappy. I just couldn’t breathe during the first stages of my grief journey. I had to inhabit the water for that time.

But now, I’m above the surface and feel like a turtle stretching out my head toward the sunlight. The long log I’m perched on feels good with its heat pushing up through my belly. I want to stay here a bit longer.

But life requires me to move. And so I leave my log and stop ducking my head into my shell and just saunter forth.

Today, I scrubbed my house. Not organized. That was last week. Not just clean. That was sort of last week too.

No. I scrubbed my house. Like on my hands and knees and going following the room’s perimeter and scrubbing. I wiped away the dust and debris from 2025 and baptised my home into this year. Because it’s time for me to live once more.

I caught up on my reviews.

I am going to catch up on my editing for my friends (Brittany and Sloan, I’m sorry that I’m behind but I have read your work).

And I’m catching up on my own writing.

Starting yesterday, I finally started creative fiction writing once more. And, like my journaling and poetry writing, I am determined to write creative fiction daily. Even if it’s just a thousand words, it’s still a thousand words more than what I had not written earlier this month. Or last year.

February: I am going to finish the first draft of Homeleaving.

March: I am going to read and edit Bear Box Diner. Maybe I’ll even write a story.

Mid-March: I want to send out poetry to literary magazines for publication.

April: I am going to rewrite Bear Box Diner.

May: I am going to help publish the literary magazine on Within and Without media.

June: I don’t know. But I will be writing. Maybe, I’ll start reading and editing Homeleaving. Maybe, I’ll start re-reading and editing Polishing the Bones. Or maybe I’ll work on my short story collection.

Maybe, I’ll just do all of it. And more. Because it’s time that I caught up with my talent and my ability and my skills and my dreams and let my inhibitions and fears try to catch me.

But they’re going to have a hard time because I have a really good headstart this time.