Nicholas Hughes - and Sylvia Plath

No snowflakes -- yet. Put the wash on the line, and watched it do its best to sail to Nebraska.

Nicholas Hughes recently died...by his own hand. What's especially sad about that is that he was the only son of a brilliant writer, Sylvia Plath:

http://news.aol.com/article/poet-sylvia-plath-son-suicide/393267

Sylvia is known best for her poetry, but her just-plain-writing is exquisite. She had an incredible eye for meaning in the smallest detail. Most people read her poems; I most enjoyed her journals and "Letters Home." (The latter was a collection edited by her mother, who was alternately worshipped and savaged in same letters. Sylvia was an equal-opportunity insulter. That leads me to believe that husband Ted Hughes, who was attacked over the years by Sylvia's supporters, arguing that his infidelity destroyed her and their marriage, may have had his own side of the story.)

When I am working (that is, writing, too), Sylvia's letters are a good jump-start. What an amazing woman. What a shame that she succeeded in killing herself by sticking her head in a gas oven back in Feb. 1963. (In a house where Yeats lived, ironically now more famous for Plath's presence.) What brilliance could she have done over the decades, if she'd just hung on through the difficult times?

Now her son follows her lead. What a huge waste.