Hello, Patient Readers,

Above, you see Mochi in his morning zen state. Last week, I was in Tennessee for my grandmother's memorial service. My family sat around swapping stories and crying and eating casseroles. As is traditional. I wrote a poem, which I read at the memorial. I will share it with you here.

A thousand things will remind me of you forever: frozen snickers and lemon chess pie, hydrangeas, paper dolls, mailboxes, chunky historical novels, quiet libraries with genealogy sections, stuffed animals with life-like features, scarves, porch gardens, birds.

But these things weren’t you. They’re short-cuts—ideas that trigger memories. Let me try again:

I remember the time we brought home a dead baby opossum.

Its mother had been struck by a car, her sad cargo scattered all over the road,

but this one looked perfect. Like it was sleeping.

You must have known it was dead.

You must have.

But you let me bring it back to your house and keep it in a quiet place,

tending its scrapes, hoping it would wake up.

Maybe hope is more important than a swift lesson about death when you are ten.

Maybe being the kind of person who tries to rescue baby opossums is more important.

You loved my cats even though you were allergic to them.

I sent you pictures of my new kittens all through the pandemic.

During our very last phone call, I was pulling weeds in my garden

and telling you a funny story about Mochi climbing the screen.

I remember how you laughed.

You were going to be the same age as Nim next year.

You and Nim and the Queen of England.

But even stories are too simplistic the capture a person. Like everyone’s life, yours requires context:

Your story spanned 95 years of blistering technological change,

from horses in the streets to a man on the moon.

You were often frustrated by the pace at which you were expected to adapt

and adapt and adapt again.

The car, the dishwasher, the VCR, the computer, the printer, the internet, the iphone—

devices that brought you along and left you behind,

that created a world so convenient that it become a different world,

finally a world that you could not understand.

You loved to read, but you never quite made sense of the eReader.

You told me once about your secret childhood reading nook,

how you climbed atop of a stack of quilts,

high on your own grandmother’s wardrobe in Mississippi,

cozy near the ceiling, escaping between the pages of books.

You read voraciously, right up until the end.

You didn’t quite make it through those books I gave you for Christmas,

but you came close.

You were a very private person, not always an easy person.

I am certain you kept secrets.

Secrets now sealed into the unknowable past, transformed into mysteries,

into photographs, into cryptic notes.

You have not been a daily presence in my life for years.

I cannot see that you are gone, and so a part of me will keep insisting that

you are still in that little room, reading, waiting for a call, a text, a visit.

There is a persistent notion that I could just dial your number

and your voice would answer,

that I could send a picture of a cat or a flower and you would see it.

You will live there forever, maybe, in some liminal space in my consciousness,

a sharpness in my chest when I remember

again and again

that you are gone.

I think you would want to be thought of.

I think you would want to be missed.

So I will miss you, Nonie. In all the little details of a well-assembled wardrobe,

in the name of a bird or a plant, in the cinnamon-cream warmth of chai tea,

in a moment of comfort with a good book, in the faces of my pets.

I will miss you when I see silk flowers and scarves and cats.

I hope that I am able to bear life’s blows with as much grace and style as you did.

I love you, Nonie.

And I will miss you.

What else is going on?

• The Pirates of Wefrivain books are finally correct on Audible. If you purchased The Scarlet Albatross or Jager Thunder on Audible in the past, delete and redownload for the updated versions. Albatross should be 17.5 hours and Jager should be 20.5 hours. You can also get these audiobooks directly from me.

• Rish is about to begin recording Arcove's Bright Side. I'm also working on the paperback.

• I've taken a break from writing during my trip for my grandmother's memorial, but I'm about to jump back into my Halvery story again. It's currently 36K words long and I think it has another 10K words or so.

Yours, an author about to do some summer writing,
Abbie

p.s. Beneath, you will find Taro, wallowing on the porch rug now that it's toasty outside.

Published Under A. H. Lee

The Incubus Series
The Knight and the Necromancer

Published Under Abigail Hilton

Hunters Unlucky Pirates of Wefrivain The Prophet of Panamindorah
The Eve and Malachi Series