Card to my niece on her ninth birthday

Monday 4/25/25

Today is my niece Lilah's birthday. She is nine. Unlike her older brother, she likes to read. (It is too early to know with my buddy Amelia, being that she is five. And also unpredictable.) Lilah and her mom read "Thank You, Human" together at Christmas. I had sent Lilah a book that got there in plenty of time--Lucy M. Boston's The Children of Green Knowe--but the card I did not mail until today. I am having a hard time keeping going and even doing simple tasks. It will arrive Friday according to the mailman. I try to write something for them in these cards that means something. Otherwise, do cards ever really? Even well-intentioned cards don't really mean anything if it's just something someone bought and then signed, unless the card is a surprise, but then it is the surprise and the gesture that means something and still not the card. My sister keeps them. I can't help but thinking I'll be gone when they look at them again later. Often I feel like I'm already one foot out of this world already. I'm not trying to feel that way. It frightens me. I have a great deal of fear being here, though. That there could ever be anything for me because I don't see how there could be. Lilah talks about wanting to go up the Monument again this summer--she said she's going to do it five times. I don't know about that, but I drew a little Monument-based candle on a cake as part of my terrible artwork which is actually a fair indication of my artistic ceiling, drawing-wise.