It Comes but Once Every Four Years

Today it snowed.

It was a snow long in duration and soft beauty but short on accumulation. About one and a quarter inches of snow accumulated in front of the apartment building, and I dispatched it into the street without any real effort.

This is also February 29th, Leap Day, a rare date, one that usually comes every four years, but which usually is skipped on years ending with two zeros.

It has significance otherwise, strangely so.

On this day in 1964 (so twelve years ago by Leap Year counting), my only blood aunt married her husband, a man who died before her. Last year in January, so just a little over a year ago, she died, emphysema taking her.

In the absence of my mother, killed in a car crash in 1999 before emphysema could begin to take her, my Auntie Nini became my only mother. She was close to us orphaned Huthlings, though only half-orphaned and happening when we were deep into adulthood.

Her passing was hard on us survivors but expected. She had been weakened by her disease and spent most of her time sitting in a chair watching television.

Yet her going was a loss of some greatness, of great weight.

Forty years to the day after my aunt's wedding, so on the day she called her tenth anniversary, my friend Liz Was (by then known as Lyx Ish, but born as Elizabeth Nasaw) died.

She, too, was sick, but also too too young to leave us so soon.

I felt the weight of that death too, even thought I had met Liz only once. She was full of life and friendliness, a joy to be around.

And she was always kind in the mails, always saying kind things about my work.

She was a maker, a poet, and a visual poet I admired for the beauty and originality of her visual poetry.

I'm sorry to have lost her art, the art she didn't have the chance to write. But I am also sorry to have lost her from the earth. And fart too soon.

Leap days are sad days for me for they remind me of deaths, or losses, of hopes not fulfilled.

I remember today these two women, always beautiful (my aunt said no-one had told her that she was beautiful when she was young, but she certainly was), always friendly, always ready to help a person.

My memories out to those of you who knew these women and what it meant to have them among us.


ecr. l'inf.