Kids, Crickets & Cactus

 I've been waiting to have a good day to update my blog for the month, and shoot, I missed the window. I had a couple of better days last week, and this morning I really feel terrible. But I am going to buckle down and write anyway. So Makena left this life on August 1. I last saw her on July 31st. It's been an entire month without my friend, and it's been a rough ride. I've made it through the funeral (which I spoke at and managed, hopefully, to give a good sense of who she was in an entertaining way, like she wanted). I've made it through four weeks of sudden, unexpected waves of grief and a whole lot of "I feel terrible and I don't know why--oh, yeah, that's right. Makena's gone." And it hits me like a baseball bat to the gut again. I wanted to blog about my friendship with her, but I don't think I can do it. Last week I finally managed to make a journal entry for myself--reading back over the texts of the first year of our friendship an...