I went home over the Labor Day weekend. My parents are both dead. It's just my brother and me. He married at 26, and that wife left sixteen years later. He was upset because he had tried really hard to make it work and it didn't, because of her. The second wife is a nice person. She brought three children into the relationship. The oldest is one of my soulmates. The second one played basketball in school and is now a lawyer. The third one is a marketing specialist. We have a farm, where he still lives. My parents' house, where I grew up, is still there. My mother lived in it for 29 years after my father died of lung cancer. After my father died, Mother gradually ran out of steam. Dad had been her rock, and her backup, in ways that I don't think she let herself know.
My Cousin Mareta My cousin Mareta died of COVID on September 12th, 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic. She vowed that there was no such thing as COVID; she’d prove there was no such thing as COVID. She was on a vent 28 days, improved a bit toward the end, then died. She was the perfect Livingston Countian: She never had a job, lived her life in a two mile radius of her childhood home, living completely for her family and community, being a volunteer, church worker and caregiver. She married the boy she began dating in her sophormore year in high school, and, by all accounts, it was a very happy marriage. I have no doubt that, if she had lived, they would have grown old together and died together. I don’t think that they ever dated anyone else. She was born a hospital, in Salem, Kentucky, but thereafter, unless she went to Paducah for her groceries or to Florida on vacation, and for her final trip in life to the ICU, she spent her life in Hampton, Kentucky. Her parents had a