It’s been a long time since I wrote online, but … I keep renewing the site, and thinking about how this site connected me to someone who knew my uncle, Erwin Preston Jr., before he died of AIDS in 1990, and how this is the only place I have written in a sustained way (only for a month or a couple of months!) in my entire life. So, I renew.

On August 14, 2024, my BELOVED Aunt Djenadi, the kindest, warmest, most generous, and most loving person in my young childhood — a woman who, no matter how full her house was with her life and her own four children, always opened her home to me — passed from this world. She, like my mom, had been suffering through Alzheimers for the past few years, and her family had her as close as they could, but all of her four children live pretty rurally and she needed specified care. So she died from a UTI but also just from this terrible disease. She got much worse when her beloved husband passed a few years ago. My family and I are flying to Texas on Friday night and returning Sunday morning — I just want to be there, and see all my cousins, and hold on to her memory. Here she is as a very, very young girl. Her faith carried her so strongly throughout her life; I hope she is with Mark in her beloved heaven now.

On the same day, my husband’s father, Clyde, suffered a heart attack. He had been in a home for Alzheimer’s as well, and not doing well, and this setback was too much for him. He held on for Jason to go and say his goodbyes, and for three of his four sons to gather with his wife (our beloved Suzanne) and pick out a final resting place, and then he passed on Sunday, August 18, 2024. We leave next Thursday to spend the weekend, and Jason’s 54th birthday, with his family in Gainesville, Fl. Clyde, during my 18 years with the Kikers, has been a very complicated figure — on my very first meeting with him he was very brusque and dismissive with me, and it didn’t get better as time went on. But I am so glad Jason exists, and Suzanne had 62 years with Clyde, and that his family and his legacy of Kiker connection will live on for hopefully many more generations. Godspeed, though he believed not at all!