hellobeautifulcreatures

Creigh Deeds, Virginia state senator . (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) He wakes up, and even before he opens his eyes, he can see his beautiful, delusional son . Gus , Creigh Deeds thinks . He lies in bed a few minutes more, trying to conjure specific images. Gus dancing. Gus playing the banjo. Gus with the puppies. Any images of Gus other than the final ones he has of his 24-year-old, mentally ill son attacking him and then walking away to kill himself, images that intrude on his days and nights along with the questions that he will begin asking himself soon, but not yet. A few minutes more. Gus fishing. Gus looking at him. Gus smiling at him. Time to start the day. He gets out of bed, where a piece of the shotgun he had taken apart in those last days of his son’s life is still hidden under the mattress. He goes outside to feed the animals, first the chickens in the yard and then the horses in the red-sided barn. He leads the blind thoroughbred outside with a bucket of feed, t...

My Barnwell SC cousins , Susan and Mary Jane. "Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were." --Anonymous "Staying with people consists in your not having your own way, and their not having theirs." --Maarten Maartens "Visits always give pleasure--if not the arrival, the departure." --Portuguese Proverb "For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread." --Rebecca H. Davis Absalom* simply would not leave . . . . . . and, having lived in, and passionately loved "my other hometown," Athens, Greece, for some three decades at the time he showed up for his visit, I could sympathize with him. How does one leave Greece? My empathy, however, was fraying. At the time he arrived, in the middle of a Greek Orthodox monks ' protest march on the Albanian Embassy, I was newly engaged, living with my British fiancé in a stunning apartment look...