Some readers have asked how this newsletter will differ from my blogs. Basically, the blogs focus on forging a life after loss, while the newsletter will roam through whatever is uppermost on our minds and include your voices. This brings me to the current event that’s causing nervous tremors: the election. I’m writing this in October so the results are unknown and probably will be for weeks afterward. My doubtful hope is for a civil post-election scene. Meanwhile, let’s not allow political disagreements to destroy treasured relationships. I was amused when my doctor refused to tell me his voting choice but slyly hinted, ”Let’s hope the right woman wins!”
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I’m pleased to announce that my poem MINUS SIGNS is in the current issue of Naugatuck River Review. Despite the poem’s title it isn’t about mathematics, but the multiplying subtractions we endure when a partner becomes seriously ill . Because the poem is so personal, I’m gratified by messages from readers telling me how it resonates with their own lives. (I’ll be glad to Email copies of the poem if you send a requbelated response to a friendwhimocked my needful time to est to ahosansky@gmail.com).)
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For those who are intrigued by magical realism , I recommend “The Cemetery of Untold Stories” by the celebrated Dominican author Julia Alvarez. The heroine is a writer who devises a unique way of giving up on her “failed” stories. She purchases a cemetery plot and buries each story in its own grave! However her characters refuse to be silenced and tell their candid real-life versions to a startled groundskeeper. Alvarez’s imagination makes this novel memorable.
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As previously stated the newsletter will include YOUR voices. My recent blog about the difficulty of making people understand our need for uninterrupted private time brought dozens of fervent comments. They all seemed to favor one line in particular, my belated response to a friend who scoffed at my need for time for myself: ‘Ultimately I found courage to tell her, ’You don’t have to understand what I need, you just have to respect it.’”

Send thoughts you’d like to share to ahosansky@gmail.com.

GREETINGS A LA MODE
As I write these words, Rosh Hashana is almost here – which accounts for the deluge of emails and texts with a routine message: health, happiness, peace, etc. This is only the beginning of a long season of greetings from Christmas to New Year’s, usually sent digitally. I fear that paper greeting cards may become obsolete.
I guess I belong in an earlier era because I miss sending and receiving cards with familiar handwriting on them. I miss scanning racks of cards in a store and choosing different ones for friends and family, geared to individual tastes. I especially enjoyed buying comical ones for friends who still had a sense of humor. I remember searching years ago for a Mother’s Day card that wouldn’t drip with sentimentality. I found one that read, Mother you made me what I am today… , NEUROTIC. I didn’t think my mother would appreciate this, but I bought it for myself.
The history buff in me decided to research how greeting cards began. Actually they owe their origin to postcards. In the mid-19th century an Austrian economics professor named Emmanuel Herman suggested that brief letters could be sent thriftily on cards. A major newspaper published this idea and it rapidly spread throughout Europe and the United States. Millions of. korrespondencekartes were sold the first months and by the end of the 1890’s they were featuring pictures on one side.
Polish artist Haim Goldberg became the principal designer of these cards, with the aid of paint and graphics. He also used actors dressed in traditional clothes, and had them model Jewish scenes such as weddings, family portraits, and so on. Goldberg even composed rhymed greetings in Yiddish. Greeting cards had been born. (Their popularity long outlived their creator, for Goldberg was murdered by the Nazis in 1943.)
Despite my nostalgia, I’m well aware that typing words on a keyboard or finding messages pre-selected by the Internet, is a lot more convenient than having to shop, address envelopes, get to the post office, and whatnot. But as with so much in life, convenience isn’t everything.
Website: annehosansky.com