You would have been fifty years old today. I would have loved to share this day with you. I become so angry when I hear women at work gripe about their age...don't they realize what an accomplishment it is to make it as far as they have? No, they don't. They didn't know you. They didn't lose you.

Gosh, Charlie and I look so young in that picture from your 48^th. I think he and I did years of aging during that last week of your life. We were so torn between wanting to hold you to us forever, yet knowing we had to tell you to let go. You'd be so proud of him, Mom. He's everything you always knew he was capable of becoming and nothing that everyone else thought he was. From his patient eyes to his gentle hands, he is you. I love him to pieces. I wish you could see. Perhaps you do.

I am sad that you're not here.

The Queen Anne's Lace is embroidering the edges of modernity, and I can't help but remember the daintiness you spread around me and the imagination you inspired. You named me after Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott's Beth, two of your favorite heroins of all time because they were quiet in their strength and deafening in their love—I always hoped that I would live up to such a tall name. I always hoped that I would make you proud.

I still do. You were a woman worthy of being impressed.

I love you.

This week, Miss Sophie met her "grandparents"—Nick's Parents. She played the defensive for awhile, hiding behind furniture and walking low to the ground with her belly rubbing the carpet, ever aware of these new people in her home. Of course, and this should come as no surprise if one takes into account the regular narrative I give on Sophie's appetite, she came around very quickly when she realized that Joan brought treats. Please Sophie's tummy, please Sophie. It's really quite simple, and I'm happy we've finally figured out the equation. She ate a cranberry orange muffin on us last week, or rather, a cranberry orange muffin wrapper...and grabbed a butter-flavored paper towel that I had used for my toast from the garbage. Good ol' Sophie: waste not, want not.

Well, just weeks after proclaiming proudly to Nick that I had found a cure to black toenails—the plague of running seasons years past—I up and un-do all of my preventative measures:

Mostly, I've started running again.

And, I blame it completely on this doohickey that makes me want to run every day, to keep outdoing my last run, even if it means jogging in 90° heat and seeing black spots in my field of vision. I am addicted. Nike+ is my new best friend.



I came in from my run last night with a shoe that looked like it could be the set for a CSI episode and I said wryly to Nick that I guess that blister wasn't ready to go running without a bandage yet. He asked unbelievably how I couldn't have felt that, that I should have had a voice in my head saying, "Stop running, you're hurt." I had to chuckle. You don't go from a couch potato to a gym rat without learning how to ignore pain.

Still, I was back out there again today, cursing the sun for coming out and beating down on me while my shirt felt 2 pounds heavier sopping wet with my sweat and actually wishing—and I can't even believe this crossed my mind—that it was a little bit cooler, that the humidity was less, and wishing for fall, when I can really put on some mileage and display some speed without that pasty thickness coating my tongue and fluid clogging my airways.

I got the doodad from Nick's Mom for Christmas, and, sadly, it lay dormant for months while I struggled to find my will to exercise after so much post surgery lazy time. Finally, Nick hounding me to use it (knowing I would love it once I started using it), I plugged it in that first time and I've been hooked ever since. I've run more in the last two weeks than I have in almost all of the summer before that—and isn't that a disgusting little tidbit? It's crazy. If you're a runner, you need this.

Nick thinks I should share with my internet audience:



It should be perfect for my birthday present at the end of this month—a trip to The Keys. Nice, short, and quite conducive to humidity. I went to Jean last night with a picture I had printed of Meg Ryan, grimacing as I handed it to her, knowing I had just become the sort of salon-goer that I hate. I did make it clear that I didn't expect to look like the actress when it was all said and done, I only wanted her hair.

After months, nay, years, of blow-drying this puppy straight day after day, it's rather nice scrunching in some gel and calling it done. I feel spoiled.

Our Mexican Jumping...Cat:



Video courteously of Nick.

It didn't seem to impress anybody else that I mentioned it to today, but a year ago I had surgery. It was the first surgery of my life, and I remember mostly wanting Mom, whose absence I still hadn't grown accustomed to. I don't even remember the pain all that keenly, only an outside awareness that it existed—this was mostly how I dealt with the pain as well, seeing as how "pain management" seems to be an oxymoron in my body's dictionary.

My family, so recently ravaged by my mother's death, were gathering in her hospital, the one with the Comprehensive Cancer Center, to cross fingers and pray that this was not happening all over again. I was so lucky, so lucky. Everything was raw—my emotions, my body, my spirit—but I was alive and I was going to be okay. My mother's surgeon fixed me in a way that she would have liked to have fixed Mom.

My mother's oncologist never had to meet with me.

They were gathered in an exam room across from mine in the general surgery clinic before I was admitted—I was there for a consultation with no idea I would find myself stuck in the hospital for a week. There must have been 10 them standing in that room across from mine, long white coats and low, detached voices...holding up films and seeming very mechanical. I saw him in that room, her oncologist, and it didn't occur to me until days later that it had been MY films they were all reviewing.

I know it's gone now, all of that...and I'm whole again. I know that it isn't a great practice to look back at bad times because it almost puts you right back in the place where it started and you're miserable all over again. But that is not the reason this event is earmarked in my history.

After Mom died, and even that last month when she was fading so quickly, I felt very alone. Falling asleep at night—what little I was sleeping in those days—would only be a chaser to hours of silent sobbing and feeling so utterly hollow. Who but your mother comes looking for you in the middle of the night when you don't answer their call? Who hurts when you hurt if not her?

I was so taken with what I had lost that I had forgotten what I had. Thank you to those of you who stood by my side even when I wasn't great company (or when I tried to break up with you, depending who you are) and for reminding me that I am loved.

I love you, too.

She's making something with sweet corn, and of course she has this clever little trick to get the kernels off the cob—and I couldn't help but remember the hot summer days of my youth. I grew up on a "farmette", not a full-fledged farm, but definitely out in the country and perfect for a dreamer's soul. To this day, even though I have only lived "in town" since I've been out of high school, I cannot imagine how some people survive childhood in the suburbs. Obviously it is done, but I just don't understand how it works. Where is the quiet time? Where do you play "ice cream shop" or "school" if not in the stale shed? Where do you sneak away and strip off your clothes to run naked through the field at dusk?

The field that butted up to the eastern portion of our lawn belonged to a kindly widower around my father's age. His youngest daughter was in my grade and we were best buds growing up, and we used to get into all sorts of trouble playing in her attic which was completely spooky and the coolest place to pretend. The farmer was always very generous with his crop and gave us carte blanch to harvest as much as we desired—green beans, peas, and sweet corn. Most of my father's large chest freezer is homegrown fare, and rarely does anything enter that isn't frozen in Zip-loc or wrapped in white butcher paper. It gets you spoiled growing up that way. Nothing ever tastes quite as fresh, and I just about embarrassed the pants off of my college roommate the first time I had seen store-bought ground beef—it looked so different...like hundreds of tiny worms!

Our neighbor would invite Dad into the corn field while he was operating the combine, and fill the back of his pickup with ears and ears and ears of corn. We would separate a few of them off the pile to eat in the upcoming days, but after that, it was time to freeze. Charlie and I were assigned the task of husking, sitting with our feet dangling off the end of the truck bed and not realizing in the slightest that our "city-kid" friends didn't do this every summer.

Our light would be fading by the time we finished, and me and my brother, gritty and tired, would wander into the house, where the rest of the process was taking place. We didn't have air conditioning in our house until much later, so you must appreciate a hot, humid Midwestern night, a small kitchen, extra bodies, and boiling water—conditions that last for hours. It was sticky work, and you felt the sweat dripping down the small of your back and down your legs.

My dad had taken a 4-inch square of wood and pounded a sturdy nail all the way through the center, so that it stood erect when the piece of wood was inverted. Mounting the cob on the nail, he would apply a corn stripper. I loved watching it—and partly because my role in all of it was done by this time, I'll grant you—but also because I would imagine myself to be my namesake, the girl my mother had so deeply loved when she was a child, living off of the banks of Plum Creek...living off of the land...working hard with your family and feeling that good kind of tired that just seems to make the world a nicer place to be.