In September of 2006, I entered the blogosphere using the tragicomic voice of a character I call my “curmudgeonly alter-ego,” Walhydra. As is the case for all egos, Walhydra is convinced that she is the real me, the important me, in this case inconveniently reincarnated as a “sixty-something, gay, would-be writer.”
Walhydra came into being as a storytelling device in the mid-1990s, when I was invited to join the Crone Thread, a private listserv of mostly pagan, mostly women elders, folk who understand, revere and emulate the Crone.
In the latter years of the blog, as I shepherded my own mother toward her death, it became more difficult to write with Walhydra’s voice.
As she herself said at one point, “How can I writing nothing but sarcastic humor when real life is shutting me down with grief and depression? It isn’t funny!”
I’ve made several attempts to revisit Walhydra’s Porch since Mom’s death in January 2011—and the death of my father this January. I love that grouchy old lady.
So far, though, silence.
For the sake of continuity, therefore, I’m copying the archival links from the Mileposts page of this blog onto a page of another blog, The Empty Path.
Please wander over to this other "porch" if you want to follow my meandering explorations.
I don't know when I will return to Walhydra's Porch. I certainly don't want to lay it down, and I'm going to leave all the posts live.
As my dear friend and sometime mentor Cat wrote me recently,
[This] is about not being able to keep up even a beloved facade when there are too many hard truths to tell in that tender, sincere voice that is also yours.We shall see.
It's not that death isn't funny, or that Walhydra is gone. It's that the voice you use these days is the voice Walhydra uses in the middle of the night, talking with someone she loves and trusts about the really, really hard stuff... Or the voice she uses with a very sick child.
In darkness and in flame,
Blessèd Be.
Michael Bright Crow
