It’s been thirty or forty years since I headed out to Evelyn’s house with my mother and my siblings. Today, I went to Evelyn’s son house to remember her. My memories were those of a kid visiting my mother’s friends. I want to write about this, the childhood memories, mixed with reflections about my mother’s social circle. Yet between the week of limited sleep during Barley’s final days, the last minutes of Barley, the memorial for Evelyn, and the upcoming funeral on Tuesday for my cousin Doug, I don’t have much energy to write.

As I stared at the blank page on the computer, I struggled. Should I skip writing tonight? I try to write at least one piece every day as part of my discipline of writing. I didn’t want to write a throwaway, “I’m too tired to write, more tomorrow”. Nor did I want to write the larger piece that is taking shape in my thoughts.

So, as I sat, the words “Time Passes” came to mind. In Virginia Woolf’s novel “To The Lighthouse”, the second section is “Time Passes”, where Woolf tries to quickly take the reader over several years between the early scenes of planning to go to the lighthouse and not making it, and the final section where they successfully make the voyage.

Perhaps there is something appropriate about this. Perhaps there are parallels between Mrs. Ramsey and Evelyn Lull. Perhaps I will finish my portrait of her tomorrow.