Standing at the Trailhead of Winter

Before I set out for my cross-country cycling adventure, my dad gave me a cardboard box. We were sitting in the living room of the little cabin he had built, where when we'd go visit, we'd walk in and see Mom sitting on the loveseat, surrounded by her magazines, books, paper, and pens. I opened the box to find several rubberbanded stacks of letters written by my mom to her parents, my grandparents. On top of the first stack was a sticky note, and in Dad's precise engineering handwriting I saw '79, '80, and so on, all the way to '86. He had painstakingly gone through all of the letters, putting them into order by year. Several more rubberbanded stacks of letters were labeled the same way underneath the first stack. As I stared at the letter on top, at Mom's clear and elegant handwriting, I wondered how many tears Dad shed while reading through the hundreds of letters. I closed the lid on the box. I would wait until we got home to begin reading them. The nex...

You know how a great idea occurs to you at the last minute? And it's one of those sit straight up in bed in the middle of the night ideas that won't leave you alone until you do something about it? That's what happened to me with the jersey I suddenly decided I had to create for the BTUSFMS ride this summer. I knew without even hesitating what I wanted to have on the front: a large sunflower. Mom loved sunflowers. I'm no artist, though, so even though a sunflower isn't all that difficult to create, I knew I wasn't going to capture what was bouncing around in my head. I do have, however, a beautiful artist friend who has been my friend since the fourth grade. I knew Connie would understand what I wanted and be able to design the idea I put in front of her. In a matter of just a couple of days, she had the design ready. She even got in touch with the company creating the jersey and spoke to the point person there to make sure the design happened just as I envisio...

Because of the upcoming cross-country trek I'll be taking part in, I've been working on my nutrition. This has included eating lots of fresh fruits and veggies, some carbs, some protein, and gallons of water. Occasionally, an urge for sugar fills me, like last evening after dinner, and I'll soothe the urge by baking cupcakes or cookies. Once I eat a cupcake or a couple of cookies, I'm satisfied and don't feel the need for anymore sweets. Last evening, the desire for oatmeal raisin cookies kept nudging at me, so I pulled out the ingredients and baked up a couple dozen. As I was measuring out the brown sugar, the baking soda, and the flour, I thought about the many times Mom had made cookies for us: oatmeal-molasses that she swore would come out wonderfully chewy if you used your hands instead of a spoon to mix all the ingredients together, chocolate chip without the chips because Dad didn't like the chips, and chilling the butter cookie dough for an hour to ensur...