If knowing as we must by now, that anatomically we consist of an aggregate of organic and inorganic molecules of building blocks for our substance, how is it that we came to the emotion of love or to mourn the absence of justice?  My friend Joe with whom I discussed this and whose interest is particle physics corrected me in that we are really composed entirely of a breakdown of these molecules to particles. Does this mean that we have truly arrived from A) a pinch of dust and B) the breath of God, so that the particles could love and mourn?  And does it mean that when the dust returns to the carboniferous earth we are finally at home in carboniferous union? And am I just a molecular aggregate skating along on the molecular aggregate contents of Mother Nature who is really my true mother with whom I will rejoin? She possibly has allowed me  the freedom to love and mourn in the period between the dust of creation and the dust of reunion.  And in that period I can self replicate praise God. How was it I thought in the past I was just a liver and a couple of  kidneys and a bag of skin and could love and mourn without the breath I received? How was it I thought I was self replicating without giving much credit to receiving my supplies freely and daily from the carboniferous earth that I gobbled up carelessly? The truth of the matter is the time between the dusts is limited and the replication starts to slow down before reunion. When the dust is finally united with the earth, the breath remains. Somewhere!

Every decade we have dragged our stuff and lived on and under it, hither and yon. I love our stuff which carries meaning.My writing from here on stuff explores meaning deeper than touch or sight. In the mid-seventies, when she was still alive our friend Carolyn stayed with us and sketched a collection of drawings of our house we had built in Victoria. The house was later designated a Heritage house in Saanich and 3 months in an Architecture Gallery Show some time later. My friends, when we built it, felt sorry for us and thought it looked like a bank. I wrote about our house in my book "A Braided Cord" and the "Force Vitale" that will accompany what you love, but a house is an empty shell, when you carry away the force vitale. Still, the drawings are in my room on the wall and  Carolyn and the house are both etched in my memory. We all have symbols whether we acknowledge them or not. And as I say in the book, "--a visible symbol is a sign of an invisible presence". There can be no apology for stuff in our life imparting a Force Vitale. It would be much like an apology for meaning.. As I also said , "It just requires vigilance to maintain control of one's own orbit."

 Above a toilet in our bathroom is a little 4 inch by 9 inch pen and ink tinted watercolor of our backyard in Plymouth, Devon where Robert and Anne played in the sand pile, collected snails for John to cook and eat at a penny a snail, and got humped by Winston, the adolescent bulldog, from time to time which we discouraged. As I stand and piddle and look at it at eye level over the years I remark to myself what memories that little painting produced 58 years ago returns to me, whereas they could spring from a paragraph now, to a book if I had the energy. John Polochi,  a general surgeon, now dead after a career in Kingston Ontario. Susan, pursuing her art in England at the time and coping with his gastronomical needs including garden snails, small birds which he trapped and  boiled sheep's heads for face meat. He helped me rake up all the broken glass from our back yard and clean and drain the bomb shelter, those residual remains from the heavy blitz in Plymouth in 1941, to make it safe for our children.  They loved them too. Canadian and Italian, we were all strangers in an other's land.