In Loving Memory

It's official! The Scented Djinn Etsy shop is in vacation mode until next year! Don't get me wrong, I am a little worried I'll lose momentum or have a financial crisis or . . . something, but I feel better about doing this than I do about not doing it.

I found out that I cannot download my Scrivener app onto my Chromebook, which I've been working on the most lately, so I sought out another Scrivener-like app that does work on Chromebook and found DabbleWriter.com. It isn't as complicated as Scrivener or as useful in some respects, but it sets everything up nicely and is a far better book-writing format than Word docs turned to PDFs which always messed up the formatting further. I was thinking of making two books, one on incense and incense making, and another on natural perfume and natural perfume making, but now I'm thinking of making these two books into one. They are the same thing, yes? Now that I've made that decision, it feels like the tangled and thorny path to finish just cleared a bit.

Death is so heavily on my mind of late. Not only because of a recent unexpected and deeply tragic passing, but also because it's spooky season, and everything dead is in our faces, from blow-up ghosts and skeletons to meatloaf shaped like zombie heads and cauldrons full of punch with jelly candy eyes and fingers floating about. Because I was thinking of the real death, I was compelled to visit my long-passed relatives in the cemetery, something I have not done in 30 years. My son found my grandparents, and then, thanks to Find A Grave dot com, we located his paternal grandfather and great-grandmother. It is difficult to describe the memories that flooded back. It felt somber yet joyous, we were together again. I do a bit of ancestor veneration, so it felt like I had completed a journey by visiting them in their resting places. I plan to return next week to bring flowers and eggs to grandma, and a Baby Ruth candy bar to grandpa. By the looks of their graves, no one has attended to them in a long time. 

One other thing I find fascinating about visiting cemeteries is the names on the grave markers. One, in particular from yesterday's visit, stuck with me. It was a lady whose given name was Icy. Apparently, Icy was a common name from around the 1880s to roughly the beginning of the 1920s. Icy Mae, Icy Pearl, Icy June (now that's a cool one, no pun intended). I found a Fayola and a Flavel, a Fern and a Fonnie. There was a Creed, a Coy, a Eula, and an Amert. I don't know why, but I find these names to be a bit magical. 

What's in a name? Everything.