Here, muse, muse, muse...

Muse 

• (sometimes lowercase) the goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like.

• (lowercase) the genius or powers characteristic of a poet.

I was on track this year to post more blog posts than I have in almost seven years. Then for whatever reason, my muse went south for the winter and I haven't been inspired to write anything. That's the funny thing about muses. You never know when they will become unamused.

I toy with the idea that I have said everything I have to say. I have shared my unsolicited opinion about many things, sometimes in a less than kind way. And considering the current state of our divided world, I think there has been enough unkind words bantered about.

I'd write about what is going on in my life, but I'm afraid the highlight lately has been getting a new fence installed (though it is pretty cool since the old one was about 44 years old and was ready to collapse any day). I could have written about my first experience with using a wood chipper to get rid of the crap load of branches I had to cut back on my hedge to allow the fence maker to tear down and install a new fence. But it was uneventful except for it eventually clogging and me not being able to decipher the instructions on how to clear the clog and restart it.

Family

For whatever reason September seems to draw me back to my birthplace. I just returned from a weekend in Boise. It was almost six years to the day that I was there at my mother's death bed. This time I was there meeting a sister I never knew I had until a few weeks ago.

I debated writing about this. It is a family matter. But it has also been a secret too long.

A few weeks ago my brother e-mailed me a link to a story posted on a genealogy site. It was a woman's story of meeting her birth mother for the first time. That birth mother was my mother.

It was, of course, a shock to me. My mother had had a baby girl back in 1945. The father was a Army Air Corp soldier stationed in Boise. When my mother told him she was pregnant, she never heard from him again. He flew back to his home town in Pennsylvania a month before my sister was born and married his high school sweetheart.

My mother was from a family of 13. She was 20 when the baby was born. She was working as a telephone operator. She had the baby at a hospital in Boise that housed "unwed" mothers. She relinquished the baby at birth. My sister was adopted by an older couple who lived in a rural area of Idaho. She was raised as an only child.

My sister eventually faced the desire to know about her birth parents and found out my mother lived in Boise. She wrote my mother a letter, but at first my mother refused to meet her. Then my sister went to Boise with a friend and the friend convinced my mother to meet the daughter she'd given up years before. My mother was 80 at the time. My sister visited her several times after that and they wrote to each other.

My mother never breathed a word of this to me or my brothers. She carried the secret to her grave.