A Giveaway to Honor Mom

                    

Mothers hold their children's hands for a short while, but their hearts forever. ~Author Unknown

Missing Mom

I'm missing my mother today on my first ever Mother's Day without her. As most of you know, Mom went home to be with the Lord in July last year. She had walked a tough path of dementia the last few years of her life. But today I'm missing her smile. Mom enjoyed life. She loved her family and took joy in her grandchildren and great grandchildren. She had so much love in her heart as most mothers do. So I hunted up a couple of pictures showing her with lots of smiles. 

Honor Mom Giveaway Contest

To honor Mom's memory this month, I'm having an Honor Mom Giveway Contest. I sent out the details of the giveaway in a newsletter yesterday. (If you didn't get it, but would like to, you can let me know and I'll add you to my e-mail newsletter list.) 

1st Prize

1st prize in the contest is a beautiful New King James study Bible. What mother wouldn't like that or wouldn't like for you to win that? That winner will also get his or her choice of one of my autographed books. 

2nd Prize

2nd prize is an autographed set of my Rosey Corner books, Angel Sister, Small Town Girl, and Love Comes Home. I picked those as a prize since Mom and all the stories she told me about growing up during the Great Depression were the inspiration for Angel Sister. Some of you may already have the books or have already read the stories, but I'm sure you have a reading friend who might enjoy the stories too should you win. 


To Enter

To enter you can send me an e-mail at annhgabhart(at)hughes(dot)net or leave a comment here on one of my blog posts in May with a way to contact you should you be a lucky winner. The deadline for entries is midnight EST on May 30, 2015. The contest is open to USA and Canada. (Sorry, international readers, but that Bible is heavy.) Also, you must be 18 to enter. 

If you want, you can share a favorite Mother's Day memory with me. That's not necessary to enter, but we always have fun sharing stories here. 

A Mother's Day Story

Some of you have already entered and shared some stories. This one from Janet made me reach for the tissue box.

"My first Mother's Day without Mama was 2 years ago. As you said, you knew your Mom loved you even though she couldn't say it.

My Mother who also had Dementia fell 2 days before she died. I went into the ER room and told the doctor she was my Mom. As soon as my mother heard my voice, she said, "Is that Janet"? I had not heard Mama say my name in 3 years. She knew I was her daughter but she didn't know my 2 sisters. She only knew them as very nice ladies who were taking care of her.

My favorite Mother's Day memory is being with her at the church she went to. She would see me sitting in the pew and her face would just light up. Oh, how I miss that!

I better go blow my nose and wipe my eyes. It's hard to type and cry at the same time."

Thank you for sharing that with us, Janet. That had to be a heart gift to you to have your mother speak your name.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. 

  

Generations of Love

"It's true, Christmas can feel like a lot of work, particularly for mothers. But when you look back on all the Christmases in your life, you'll find you've created family traditions and lasting memories. Those memories, good and bad, are really what help to keep a family together over the long haul." (Caroline Kennedy)

Family - generations of love. Grandmother to mother to grandchild. As you might imagine, I'm missing Mom as the Christmas season approaches and remembering those family traditions and memories she helped create in my life. I'm sure many of you have experienced like feelings after you've lost loved ones. I am grateful for all the good memories I have and for the pictures that awake many of those memories. 

Somehow we never took a generation picture with my mother. Don't know how I missed out on that opportunity with the hundreds, even thousands of pictures I've taken over the years since my first grandchild was born. We weren't able to do the five generation pictures that are sometimes printed in our hometown paper here because my grandparents were gone before I had grandchildren, but we could have done a four generation one. Now that picture will have to be only in my heart. 

As those of you who read Sunday's post or get my newsletter know, I'm having a Christmas giveaway contest with the above figurine as the first prize along with one of my books. You have to win a book, you know. LOL. I like writing about families in my stories. I like exploring the relationships in my fictional families and I like sometimes letting those families reach out and pull people into their family circle that aren't actually related by anything but the love in their hearts. That is especially true in my Heart of Hollyhill series with the great bond between Jocie and Wes. (Scent of Lilacs is still a free download if any of you haven't grabbed it yet.) It's true in my Rosey Corner books too with how Lorena finds a forever place in the Merritt family. In the first Rosey Corner book, Angel Sister, generations play an important part in the storyline. 

All that to explain that's why I picked this particular prize - to celebrate families. You can read all the details of the contest on my website here. Entering is easy. An e-mail or a comment here as long as you be sure to leave a way to contact you. For fun, you can tell me something you especially like about Christmas. I've been reading your messages already. Not got them all read yet since I had some of those grandkids visiting this weekend and have been playing catch-up ever since. But here's one of the messages from Jan that seems to sum it all up. 

"My favorite thing about Christmas is the family catching up and being together during this wonderful season. The memories that are made and the tales that are told. The window dressing of Christmas trees and lights and the beautiful music just makes it more fun but it's all about the miracle of God sending his son to earth for our sins."

Family. Memories. Stories. Beautiful lights and music to celebrate the greatest gift - the birth of Jesus.  Yes, Jan, that is Christmas. 

Thanks for reading. 

Sorting through the Odds & Ends of Mom's Life

The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life. ~William Morris

Mom's been gone for over a month now. For a while it's felt like she's still at the memory care facility and I need to go see about her. But that's not so. She doesn't need anybody to see about her now. She's in a better place. Her smile is back. She's laughing and glad to finally be "home" with her mother and dad. She would sometimes say when she had a moment of clarity before the dementia got worse that she was ready to go on except she didn't want to leave us. Then at the end she no longer remembered us so perhaps that made it easier for her to leave. 

We've begun going through her things. So far we've just scratched a little of the surface, but already we're seeing things with no real value except that they meant something to Mom. All the odds and ends of a life well lived. There's the newspaper article with my picture when one of my earlier books was published. Then we find a certificate she received for work with the Homemakers. We go through piles of bird magazines because she did love her birds. We find enough greeting cards and stationery to fill a shopping bag. I know she intended to send each and every card to her many friends. The old Scrabble game that dates back to our childhood is in a shirt box. She saved it even though someone gave her one of the deluxe game boards that swiveled and had little pockets for the tiles. We found the dictionary so well used as she worked her crossword puzzles that it was falling apart. 

Mama's memory is soaked into everything we pick up. We find Dad's jacket with his horseshoe champion patch sewn on it. And there in the back of a closet are his clay court croquet mallets. We take garbage bags full of things to Goodwill and put other garbage bags in the trash. But we also have piles we keep for ourselves. Things we can't seem to part with. I think we're all going to have to build on a storage room. And we haven't even started on the real memory drawers. 

But it has to be done and I'm fortunate to have two sisters to work through the memories with me. What can we save? What will we do with this? Do you want it? Where will we put it? How can we part with it? The questions echo between us.

Mom has keepsakes from her family and from Dad's family too. And now we are going to have keepsakes too. But the best keepsake is all the memories of times with her. We will part with what we have to with sadness, but we'll never part with the memory of her love.  

Have you had to sort through a loved one's things? What was the hardest part of that for you?

A Penny from Heaven

Have you ever read about people finding pennies after a loved one dies? I'd read the stories and thought it was great that these people had found something to help them through their grief. Did I believe the pennies were really from heaven? Did I think the person who had passed on had somehow found a way to manipulate a penny into a place where it would be seen by one of their loved ones? A place where you might not expect to see a penny, but these people found a penny there. In some of the stories, the pennies even have the birth date or some other meaningful date to the person finding it or the person who had passed on. 

I never doubted the sincerity of the people telling the story, but I'm something of a skeptic or maybe like somebody from the Show Me State. If I couldn't see it for myself, I always figured it was some kind of weird coincidence and/or the surviving person wanting to find a connection.

And then we went to the memory care facility Monday to get my mother's things. She didn't have a lot there. Just her clothes and blankets and wheelchair. But to keep from making a lot of trips the people at the facility let us borrow a dolly that made a little cart to carry the boxes and bags out to the car. We loaded it down and rolled it out to my car. When we finished unloading it, I started to take the dolly back inside and there on it was a penny. Face up. Now it could have fallen out of the old purse Mom had at the home. That was certainly a possibility for she did have a few coins in that purse. But the purse was up on top of the piles of clothes. It seems unlikely that a penny would have fallen out of it and not bounced off the metal dolly to roll away on the floor.  Of course, it could have taken a lucky bounce and stuck on the railing, but the second I saw the shiny penny, I remembered the stories I'd read about all the pennies from heaven. And I felt a gentle touch from heaven that everything was all right. 

My mother had a similar comfort experience after her mother died. My grandmother died suddenly and so Mom was not really expecting her death as we were with Mom. In the days after my grandmother died, Mom had trouble sleeping. Then one night as she was lying awake in bed, she says she saw her mother coming over to the edge of a cloud to look down at her and tell her, in no uncertain words, she was doing fine in heaven and she wanted Mom to quit all that worrying about her. That things were good in heaven. 

Things surely are good in heaven. And some of us have a penny to prove it. 

Have you ever heard a penny from heaven story or experienced something like that yourself?

My Mother, My Friend

Mom and Dad on a date

         

Mom on her honeymoon

 The first friend any of us have is our mother. And my mother was the best friend I could have ever had. She taught me how to embrace life and that the more love you give away, the more you are blessed with in your heart. She was cute when she was young, beautiful as a young woman and each year that passed brought her even more beauty. Here's a photo tribute to her.

Mom when I was a girl

Mom and some of her grandchildren

Mom and her sisters

Dementia stole her memories but not her spirit. And now as one of our family members said, the big four are together again. She meant Mom and her sisters. They did know how to laugh together and have a good time.  
 

One of my favorite pictures of Mom

Mom and one of her great grandchildren

Mom loved all her grandchildren and then when the great-grandchildren came along, she was ready with smiles and love for them too. 

Mom helping me make her famous crackerjacks

She didn't do a lot of needlework or craft type things, but she did have some specialities, like making delicious crackerjacks and a chocolate pie that was out of this world. She crocheted one afghan and wove one basket just to prove she could. She also once picked wild cherries to make jelly and she brought home huckleberries from Oregon and made wine. She had fun trying new things. 
 

 

 

 

Mom holding her youngest great grandchild

Mom loved babies. Each new addition to the family was treasured. During her last weeks at the memory care facility, her baby doll could always bring a smile as she carefully held and loved it. I'm so blessed that I was once that baby she held and loved.

Mom doing Physical Therapy

My mother passed Saturday morning with a last whisper of breath. I was with her when she went. I didn't see the angels that came to get her, but I know they were there. I will miss her smiles and kisses, but I celebrate her life well lived. My mother, Olga Elizabeth, headed on up to glory after 94 years here with us. I'm glad I was able to share so many of those years with her. I'm thankful she was my mother, my friend.

Mom's last good picture at The Lantern

Thank you for your many prayers and kind thoughts and comments as you read some of my posts about Mom's dementia. So many of you have walked the same hard roads or have lost your beloved mothers to other illnesses. We join hearts to remember all those beautiful mothers and if your mother is still with you, give her a hug for all of us who can no longer hug our moms. 

Hands On Learning - Experience Not Required

This is the very first picture of me as a mother. I was very young. Seventeen. But I loved that baby from the first moment I knew I was expecting even though it meant my life was going to drastically change. My girlhood days would come to an end and I would have to be an adult. A mother. 

I didn't know anything about being the mother of a baby. I knew my mother. She was a wonderful mother to me, but I was the baby of the family. So while I was fascinated with babies, I had rarely held a baby before my own baby was born. My older sister had a baby a little over a year before I did, but her baby was a mama's girl and didn't take to other people holding her. So I had mostly smiled and played with her without picking her up. I was afraid I wouldn't know what to do if she cried. Actually, I do know what I would have done if she cried. I would have handed her off to her mother or my mother.

But suddenly (9 months can feel sudden sometimes) I was a mother. A baby boy was dependent on me for care. I had to hold him and keep him fed and dry and smiling if I could. I had to rock him through stuffy noses and teething and nights when he wouldn't sleep. Besides that, I had to put meals on the table and keep our old farmhouse relatively clean. I had to wash clothes and diapers and try to figure out how to treat diaper rash.

The one thing I didn't have to figure out was how to love him. That was with my whole heart. And somehow I stumbled along and with the help of my husband and my mother who was always ready with the answers I needed about what a mother should do, I managed to raise a wonderful son. Not quite two years later, my daughter came along and then some years after than, my youngest son. By then, I felt like an old hand at being a mom. 

But the first baby, it was all hands on learning. In spite of my inexperience, he turned out all right. Well, better than all right. He was a wonderful son and still is. Now he's a great husband and father too. Here we are probably when he was a senior in high school.



You know what got me through. Mother love. Mine for him and my mother's for me because she was always ready to help. She never said I was too young although she probably thought it. She was my rock when I needed someone to lean on. I treasure the days we spent together when my kids were little. A good time for me. A good time for them. A good time for Mom. And she loved my grandkids too. Here she is with my two oldest grandkids about twelve years ago.
 
Mom doesn't remember those times now. But I believe they are still part of her and at times the echoes of their happiness brings a smile to her face even if she can't remember what is being echoed in her heart. 

I put this quote I really liked in our church bulletin today. "My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune." (Graycie Harmon)

That's Mom - remembering the tune of a loving mother even though she has forgotten the words. 

Did you know all about babies when you first became a mother? Or were you like me and had to learn on the motherhood job?

Seeing the Light through Dementia's Darkness

A Special Treat

I have a special treat for you on One Writer’s Journal this week – a guest post by Kristy Robinson Horine. 

I met Kristy at the Licking Valley Writers’ Conference when I was signing my books at a writer’s event last fall. At the time, Kristy was the executive director of the conference, but life was about to change for her. While her other three children have long since left babyhood behind, she was excited about expecting her fourth child. 

A New Season in Life

Now she’s entered a new season in her life with the care of her baby girl and she's using this time to explore new options in her writing. Kristy read my posts about my mother’s dementia and very generously sent me a beautiful piece she’d written about the journey into dementia she witnessed her grandmother taking. Not a good journey, but sometimes there is joy in the moments. She found that joy with her Meme and wrote about it. The photo is of her Meme at a nursing home on one of her last birthdays before she got to go on home to heaven. Can't you just see her personality shining through the dementia?

Kristy is letting me share her story forward so that her words can perhaps bless those of you who have walked this hard path with your loved ones. In some ways every journey for those suffering dementia is similar, but at the same time, each walk along this path is also different. But sharing what we experience can help us to see the light between the dark things.  

Riding Fences  

       by Kristy Robinson Horine

     Momma gave me The Look when they arrived. Papaw had packed Meme into his candy apple red Toyota and bumped along country roads to our house. It must have been pretty bad this time. I urged Meme toward the door.

     “Come look at the garden I planted Meme,” I said. I grabbed both of her hands and steadied her down the brick steps, across the cistern, down a concrete block step, and into the yard. Meme puffed hard, wheezing. After a few steps, we stopped to rest.

      Inside, Papaw was telling Mom how Meme had removed the gate from the hinges when she couldn’t get out of the padlocked yard. He was telling how she had escaped and told strangers passing by that someone in her house was trying to kill her. He was telling about the conversation with the police officer who didn’t know about Meme and her Alzheimer’s. 

      Outside, it was just me and a woman who could no longer remember my name.

     “Now, I want you to just look out there,” she breathed with her mouth open. “Do you remember when we was in Caden Town?”

      I looked at her eyes and knew I would lie. “Yes ma’am,” I said.

     “Do you remember how much work it was? Daddy made me work. Would take that razor strap to me if I didn’t do it. You know that Mamaw T and Papaw Tuttle were multi-millionaires, but I thought I had worked my ass off,” she said. I no longer flinched when Meme cussed. Her filters were just about gone, but this time, she had remembered to whisper talk the bad word.

     “Yes ma’am,” I said. “They didn’t want for anything, did they?”

     She hooked her elbow through mine: us against the world. I didn’t have a clue about Caden Town, but I liked the co-conspirator feeling. Her eyes shined in the sunlight.

     “We was born different,” she said. “The two of us.”

     “Yes Ma’am,” I said.

     The distance to the garden from the house stretched with every wheeze, but we made it. I secretly hoped that Papaw was giving my mother an earful. I also secretly hoped that God wouldn’t answer my prayers to take Meme before she got too bad, right there next to the garden. Meme had gotten a bit heavy since she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten. She couldn’t remember that full meant stop. I just wasn’t certain I could lift her if she hit the ground.

    We settled down onto a swinging bench at the edge of the snow peas I planted. I told her about shoveling manure and spreading it around after everything had died off the season before. I told her about running the tiller for the first time ever. I told her about how the wind blew as I hoed my rows, moving the string I had tied up between two broken tobacco sticks. I told her that Papaw said I could plant more in a crooked row anyway. There was something like an apology in my voice. Suddenly, I wanted my garden to be full and thick with fruit. I wanted Meme to see even though I knew she wouldn’t remember. I stopped talking when I realized her mind wasn’t sitting with her body.

    “I want you to look out there,” she said. I thought she was going to ask me about Caden Town again.

     “Yes ma’am?”

     “Do you see how that dark goes like that?” she moved her hand in a horizontal line and wiggled her fingers as if to mimic a flitting bird. “Do you see that dark?”

      I squinted into the distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of what she described. I shook my head.

     “Those dark things there,” she said, waving her hand back and forth, more insistent. “The ones with the light in between.”

  

   Again I looked and realization came at once. “Are you talking about the black fence just on the other side of the garden?”

   Her hand relaxed, patted my knee. She exhaled then, after I named the darkness for her. “Yes. Fence. That fence. That’s right. Look there, between them.”

    I leaned my head closer to hers, tried to see what she saw, like a child trying to find a single constellation in a sky full of stars.

    “That’s what you need to see. The part that’s not dark,” she said. “You need to see the light.”

    In that moment, I rode the fence between my reality and hers. In that moment, we both saw the light.

About Kristy

~Writer, teacher, poet, artist, mother & wife Kristy Robinson Horine has worked as a journalist, studied through the Christian Writers Guild, and is now a freelance journalist. She writes for Kentucky Monthly and has a couple of blogs, A Kentuckian in Paris, and Write One Real Life.

Thanks, Kristy

Thank you, Kristy, for sharing. My mother is struggling more each week with communication, but she has begun to hold and talk to a doll and that seems to comfort her. Perhaps it gives her purpose to care for the “baby.” But each smile whether directed toward me or toward the doll is a moment to appreciate when I visit. As Kristy’s Meme said, you need to see the light.

Stories Never Told in Words

"Life is a journey; photography is thy shepherd." (Destin Sparks)

On my Facebook page I have certain things I do on different days of the week. Mailbag Tuesday. Shaker Wednesday. Sunday morning coming down when I give my Facebook friends a glimps of the world I see outside my window. Friday, I do my best to post smiles all day long. And Thursday is Throwback Day when I, along with many others on Facebook, post old photos. That has me looking back through old photo books and snapping pictures of pictures. The one above is from my mother's first photo album. That photo album is about the size of one of the bigger paperback books and has a wooden cover attached together with leather strips. The front cover has a piece broken off it. It's been that way ever since I can remember. 

In the album, Mom has attached the pictures to the pages with those black corners. She has photos of her dating days with Dad and also shots posed with other friends from when she was in school. It's a stroll down her memory lane. Those are memories she has lost now, but there in her photo album, they live on in the pictures and in the notes she wrote under the photos. 

This picture is my dad, years before he met Mom. He was 21 years old and had ridden his motorcycle all the way across country to Oregon to visit cousins there. Mom would have been 11 or 12 when this photo was taken since she was almost ten years younger than Dad. She didn't meet him until she was 18 and he was 28. They met when he was on a date with a friend and she was with a different fellow. She used to say that she took one look at Dad and knew he was the man she was going to marry. I don't know how long it took her to convince Dad of that, but they did start dating right away. And they did get married the day after she graduated from high school. 

"Look at the people in the very old photographs! They are gone forever but they still can give us messages with their eyes, they still can touch our hearts with their looks and they still can give us courage with their standing upright!" (Mehmet Murat ildan)

I look at Dad in this picture and I see a young man I never knew. A man willing to take off across the country with a map and a little money in his pockets in spite of his mother in tears begging him not to go. He went. He slept on the ground, shivered in the cold, sweated in the heat, and made it to Oregon. It was a highlight of his life and I wish I had asked him more questions about that journey. It was a journey off the farm and toward independence. He came back to the farm after his summer in the west, but I daresay he was never the same boy who rode away on that motorcycle. 

There are things that I can never know about how my parents were when they were young, but I can see glimpses of them in those old pictures and imagine how it might have been for them. I'm sure it is the same for my children. Stories never told in words, but only glimpsed in a face staring out of a photo.
  
"When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure."

Do you have treasured photos that make you remember? 

Do you wish you'd taken more time to talk about back when with your parents and grandparents before it was too late?

Mom's New Place

I haven't talked about Mom for awhile here. Not since I told you we were moving her into The Lantern, a memory care home for those with Alzheimer's or dementia problems. It's a very nice facility, bright and open, and the staff are kind and caring. 

Even so, it's been a difficult transition. The first week, we were in the ER twice because she fell, once at night and once late in the daytime. She had bruises and no major injuries. I cringed every time the phone rang, fearing another fall. But since then in almost two months now, we've made one more ER visit. Again, a fall in the night. Again, only bruises. 

Mom's a pretty tough cookie. But it could not have been that way. She could have been hurt worse, and that makes the falls a major guilty poke for my sister and me. We were watching her so closely at her house that we were right with her every time she sat up in bed. We had a bed alarm but after replacing it once at a high price, we just went with wind chimes tied to her walker. Then we placed the walker beside the bed so that she'd hit it and ring those "bells" when she tried to get up. The memory care home is not equipped for one on one observation at night. We signed numerous papers saying we were aware of that before Mom moved in. The workers do check on the residents periodically, but there's plenty of time in between checks for Mom to wake up and decide it's time to "go to school" or that somebody is "out front waiting for her." Or maybe just because she needs to "go."

There are other problems. She wouldn't eat at first. At home, she ate whatever we fixed, but once at the home, she wouldn't even look at the food on her plate. That is getting better. She eats breakfast now and dabbles with her other meals. Another problem, she doesn't like them giving her baths and helping her dress in the mornings. You have to realize where she is with this. At home, when I would tell her we needed to go get cleaned up, she'd tell me she just had a bath. In her mind, I'm sure she had. Sometimes I would have to talk for an hour before she'd come around to letting me help her bathe. The aides don't have the time to do that at the home. They have other residents to get ready for breakfast. So I understand the problem, but I know no solutions to suggest. The best help I had at her house was simply prayer that she'd be in a cooperative frame of mind.  

All's not bad though. Even though she wouldn't smile for me in the photo I snapped on Friday, she seems happier or more satisfied there than she was at her house. She still talks about "going home" to see her mother and father or that she needs to go cook supper for my dad. But she doesn't try to go out the door the way she did at home. I think because the place is bigger and the trip to the door is so far up the hallways, (and of course, locked if she did get to the door) she gets distracted easier. She thinks she'll have to wait until later. Plus, the other people there distract her too. 

There are residents at the home who are much younger and in better physical health than Mother and in better mental health too. Some of them wander a bit, walking to find an escape from the confusion that reigns in their minds. Others never say a word. One lady whispers everything and another lady sometimes stands in the corner and cries. 

In contrast, Mom has been chattering a mile a minute the last week. Nothing she says makes a lot of sense and she doesn't process what you say to her correctly. You say one thing and she thinks you've said something totally different. Makes for hard conversations. In this photo, she's telling me she has four of them - fingers, I think.

I haven't felt as if she's known me for a couple of weeks now. When an aide asked her if I was her daughter on Friday, she said no quite emphatically. But I am, whether she knows it or not. And she still smiles when she sees me. At least at first. Then sometimes she's ready for me to leave so that she can go home. After all, you can't leave company to do what you want. Innate hospitality forbids that. Maybe that's what keeps her satisfied in the big gathering room. 

My sister or I go see her almost every day. I'm not sure that's helping her, but it helps us. You see, it's not only Mom who has to adjust to the new arrangement, but us as well. Care taking is a demanding thing and it wraps tentacles of guilt around you when you come to the place where you think you can't do it any longer. 

But what we are continually reminding ourselves is that she wasn't happy at her house and she seems more content at the facility. There is the danger of falls. She is getting worse with her communication, but that could have happened at home too. The main thing for us to remember is that we love her and she loves us whether she's able to show that any more or not. 

She was a wonderful mother and I miss her. Those of you going through some of the same things with your loved ones understand what I mean when I say I miss her. Let's all lift up a prayer for those with this dreaded disease and for the families who have to watch their loved ones decline into a terrible world of confusion.

P.S. 

I took a walk back to my wildflower area today and was surprised to see a lot of the flowers blooming. The one above, Dutchman's Breeches, was always one of Mom's favorites. And I also saw my first snake! I think he was cold since he didn't slither away but let me step right past him on the path. 

  

Thanks to all of you who downloaded my book, Scent of Lilacs. It's going to be free for a while longer, so if you have e-reading friends, I hope you'll tell them about it. You can check my last blog post to see the links to the places where you can download the book. And you're always welcome to share my blog posts with any friends you think would like to read my ramblings. Thanks. You're the best.