Our House

This is our house.

You planted these ficas in the front yard. You built these wooden pillars to cover the old colonial ones. You carried this bench to the front porch – the one that we brought from our home in Maryland. You cut this grass. You put in the new front door, and put up the new accent lights on the pillars and garage.

You replaced the porch step. You cleaned these gutters. You trimmed these trees.

You touched and painted and fixed and refined everything in this house, completely remodeled the kitchen.

You did everything yourself. You rarely asked for help – until the end, when you were so sick.

How can I ever leave it?

August 16, 2017

About the author

Katherine Billings Palmer is a technical writer, poet, and essayist from Garden City, Michigan. She’s won several academic writing awards, including first place in the University of Michigan Dearborn Critical Essay Contest for her work about poet John Donne: “‘The Sun Rising’: A Lover’s Boast.”

In 2017, Katherine’s husband, Rick, died of complications from small cell lung cancer. She wrote a series of poems and essays about her struggles to cope with her grief. I Wanted to Grow Old With You is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.

Her latest book, A Widow’s Words: Grief, Reflection, Prose, and Poetry – The First Year was published in January 2019 and is also available on Amazon.com.

Katherine is a guest blogger for the Hope for Widows Foundation and writes about her grief journey at www.TheWritingWidow.com.

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