©2020 Naomi Baltuck

I dedicate this story to Jamie G. Dedes, my friend and the founder and editor of the BeZine.  When she was diagnosed with a fatal lung disease, she must have felt like her world, as she knew it, had ended.  But her poetry, more than ever, hummed with truth and wisdom, each poem a love letter to the sweetness and bittersweetness of life.  Jamie built a new world, and with all her disabilities, she lived every day with more life and love and energy and purpose than any able bodied person I know.  She pulled together a global collective of poets, artists and writers dedicated to peace, sustainability, and social justice to carry on her work.  Her life was a gift she shared with us all, and her legacy timeless.