A Farewell To My Father

by Rebecca Valentine1 Comment
Yesterday, my dad asked his beloved wife Lee to help him find his passport and then get him to the airport. He had a trip to make. Lee assured him she would. The thing is, she won't. My father had a stroke on April 11. He spends his days in the advanced stages of dementia. My father is dying. Those words are not easy to write. When I think of them--which I do, about 247 times a day--I feel guilty. Sad. Powerless. He is my father; during the best parts of our relationship, he was my dad. Now, he is an 81-year-old man who cannot do anything for himself...who survived emergency brain surgery only to barely escape falling victim to heart attack and then was left too ravaged to fight off pneumonia. He has lost 45 pounds in five weeks. He doesn't want to eat. He hardly wakens, and he will never again do those things which brought him happiness--read a book, watch a...
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So This is Maine

by Rebecca Valentine1 Comment
I write this sitting on the sofa in what we call the "main room" while listening to Seals & Crofts. To my left is a fireplace, where a fire is roaring. To my right, on the floor, lies Kya, our beloved pit bull-lab; she is keeping my feet warm with her massive body. The view from where I sit is noteworthy: Rain is coming down in sheets, sometimes sideways, other times, all whirly and swooshy. The leaves on the trees that line our side of the inlet are red and orange, gold and green. The leaves on the other side of the water are still green.Wind keeps the scenery ever-shifting as trees sway and the water current swiftly churns. The tide will come in later today, as it always does, and the water line will be higher than usual. I love being here. The kids and I have lived here now for six weeks. We are still transitioning, and probably will be...
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So I Wrote This Book…

by Rebecca Valentine1 Comment
In April of 2009, I was contacted via email by a guy named Travis Thompson. Travis had a story to tell. A BIG story. A loooooong story. A fascinating story, really, about a Mormon kid who made good despite having an extermination order on his head, witnessing his uncle's violent death, surviving the death of his own beloved 5-year-old daughter, and experiencing the inherently risky life of a 19th-century adventurer on the American frontier. This pioneer's name was Perry A. Burgess, and if you're at all familiar with Steamboat Springs, you've heard of him, or at least his last name. It permeates that town. Maybe you've ridden his ski lift, or attended gatherings in one of his meeting rooms. Perhaps you've visited the Tread of Pioneers museum (which just happens to sit on the site that was once his backyard) or strolled along Burgess Promenade, which enjoys views of Burgess Creek. Seriously. The dude is everywhere. So Travis asks me if I'd...
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Just How Similar Are We?

by Rebecca Valentine2 Comments
Writers write for different reasons. Most of us, if pressed for an answer, will say we can't not write. It's like exhaling; we must do it.I write to make sense of my world. I've been writing since I was a young girl, when it became clear to me that there wasn't a lot of logic or predictability or even, sometimes, sanity, in my world. I wrote poetry and journal entries. As a tween, I suspected my mom was reading my diary, so I wrote a series of, shall we say, colorful entries regarding boys. Total fabrications, mind you, but it was the only surefire way I could tell if she was indeed invading my privacy. I came home from school one day to have my face slapped, hard. Yep. She was reading my diary.At any rate, writing helps me think through both the tedious and the monumental. It allows me to cope, escape, confront. As an adult, I've written about...
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