Syrup on My Keyboard

I'd mentioned that my friend Kathy who died at the new year had liked yogurt on her pancakes, and I know this because we met for pancakes about once a year, in the fall when a nearby restaurant makes pumpkin pancakes. She'd even bring her own yogurt.

Last night I took myself out for Kathy M. Memorial Pancakes.
These are the leftovers, blueberry-banana-walnut.

 And now I've eaten them all and didn't get syrup on my keyboard.

I talked with Kathy's closest friend since I last wrote. She told me Kathy'd only been diagnosed with cancer a couple weeks before she died---she'd thought she had mono or something.

While I'm devastated at Kathy's death––more than I'd have expected, actually––and deeply grieved for her mother especially––you couldn't grieve her life as unfulfilled or half-lived.

She came across as pretty calm, mostly, but she had a compact intensity, like gorp, that fruit-and-nut mix hikers carry. Once I proofread an opinion piece Kathy wrote for the newspaper, and mostly I took out exclamation points. (I think she put them back in.)
She sort of calmly packed her life with exclamation points.

I've been thinking if I really meant what I'd said after Carrie Fisher died (she and Kathy were both four-ish years older than me), that if I died in four years, it wouldn't be a tragedy. 

And I really do mean it.
I've been in a lovely mood all these winter holidays, even with sad news, bad news, and hard writing, and I feel that's my baseline:
basically, things are OK with me.

I would be deeply sad to leave you all, and everything––life is a terrible pain in the neck, but it's so interesting––but would I regret things I've left undone?

Not that I can think of, though there are some things I'd like to do.
For instance, I'm really taken with this new idea of mine to write a short ghost story for reading aloud at Christmas. 
Wouldn't that be a neat thing to leave behind?
I'll give it a shot.

Funnily enough (or not?), if I died soonish (and I don't intend to or anything!), a big thing I'd be happy about is that I've written this blog for nine+ years.
I wish everyone I love would blog for years and years, and if they died before me, I could revisit their everyday chit-chat and observations.