ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Prologue: Searching

NOTE: Welcome! If you’re a follower and “missing” chapters, please go to ernieandernestina.medium.com to catch up. Also, I haven’t posted any photo of Ernie or Ernestina, which are nicknames, on medium.com or google, so any photo showing up is not a photo of either of us.

My previous book, Ernie and Ernie: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife, which covers my forty-year marriage to Ernie and the first year without him, ends with my staying with our son, Joshua, at my brother Rich’s house — also my childhood home — as Joshua recovers from a series of anxiety attacks.

Joshua’s come home from L. A. to heal. He’s also facing a decision about a house on Charles Street, which he won in a bidding war; its closing has been delayed for six months because of a problem with its title. Does he still want to buy the house?

What he’s really recovering from, and what I’m recovering from, is the death of Ernie.

I am on a search. And I realize as I write the word search that the word reach is within it. Yes, I will be reaching within myself and outside myself in my search for self.

Here, then, is Ernie and Ernestina: Searching, which begins one year after Ernie’s death.