Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

This statement is sadly true. I wish it wasn't. I'm not sure what to do about it. My mom is gone, and that makes me furious. My family has little money and we're not really as close as many other families, and that makes me furious, too. And my dad is limited in a way that makes me feel lots of different things. He hoards things in his bedroom. My sister thinks it's because he has very little that he has control over, so he holds on to what he has.  This includes things it doesn't make sense to hoard, like shampoo and conditioner.  He won't let my sister take them to the bathroom when his are empty; he makes her buy more. On Thursday my sister went into his room and saw that he'd taken some Christmas cards from the large pile in the living room. They were lying on his bedside table, neatly stacked, each one signed with my dad's shaky left hand. Much the way swearing is a remaining reflex of speech, his signature, signed in his non-dominant hand, is a...

When my mom died, I felt completely lost and totally incapable of figuring out what to do next, but I had no doubts about what to do first.  Oddly enough, I knew I needed a journal and a little black dress.  The first was where I was going to write down all my memories about my mom so that I wouldn't lose them.  The second was to wear when I gave her eulogy.  When times are hard, I like to look awesome.  It makes me feel more put together than I really am, and I knew I'd need all the help I could get to make it through the memorial service. That's neither here nor there.  Right after my mom died, I wrote in the journal a lot, as many of the good things as I could remember.  And then I put it aside for a while.  And now I've picked it up again.  Except now I'm writing down all the things I left out before.  Things that in the past I've had a hard time talking about, much less committing to paper.  But the last time I picked up the ...