thoughts in the rain

I guess every fiction writer slips into autobiography every now and then.  Yesterday I wrote (from the viewpoint of a middle-aged female character, whose mother died years before, at the beginning of the book)

"Sometimes I really wish I had my mother here, to laugh with me about the ways we torture time and space to bring it into alignment with the linear illusion that we inhabit.  Here in the provisional reality of cyberspace."

-- and in fact that is literally true.  My mother's been gone for more than twenty years now, but I still miss her presence, especially as an old woman when I was an adult myself.  So now I'm a couple of years older than she was ever allowed, and on this rainy morning I feel deprived of those decades I've traveled without her.  Far better, I think, than being relieved to be free of her, which I know is just as common.

Joe