Page 52 of Kate & Frida

The Puget Sound Book Company

101 South Main Street??Seattle, WA 98104

9/25/93

Dear Frida,

Of course you care what Kirby will think. He’s one of your best friends. And he didn’t go to all that thoughtful effort with the coffee just to please the Ramonas. Don’t worry! He’s going to love your writing. Especially the food stuff since you’re both such fanatics.

I’m not really in the mood for describing, but here you go. Bumpa’s new nursing home has nice personal touches like homemade quilts and a golden retriever named Abigail. And the gardens are going to radiate color when the rhodies and azaleas bloom in the spring. Not as bad as the last place, but it still smells like a nursing home, that icky combination of high school cafeteria gravy and all the Ensure they feed the patients. But it doesn’t get me down because Mom visits Bumpa every day now, and that makes both of them so happy. Dad even picks him up on weekends sometimes and brings him out to the lake for a few hours.

It’s strange not seeing Bumpa so much. I didn’t realize how much time I spent thinking about visiting him and feeling guilty about not visiting him more. Knowing he’s with Mom all the time opened up a lot of extra room in my mind, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Like when I was rereading Little Women last weekend. It was one of my favorite books growing up, and when I got to the part where Jo goes to the newspaper office, it was like a time machine whooshed me back to my high school bedroom. Hippie fabrics all over everything, and I bought this steamer trunk at Kmart and pretended it was a coffee table to make my room look like an apartment. I even stuck candles in Chianti bottles. But the thing is I didn’t just travel back to the physical space. My brain was fifteen again. I was writing a romance novel called Seattle Blue , and I felt exactly what it was like to be me then. Absolutely certain about who I was and what I wanted to write.

It got me remembering that Virginia Woolf assignment in college again, and Caftan Dawn telling Sven I won’t have anything important to say until I’m forty, and now I’m obsessing about how I went from total self-confidence to feeling totally lost. I’ve started half a dozen short stories, and I’m spinning in circles. Frida, what if I don’t find my way? Not even when I’m forty. Lately, it’s like the bees are trapped under my skin buzzing around trying to escape. Sven’s been asking me why I’m so grouchy lately, but I don’t have the energy to get into it.

Love,

Kate