Moved by Mom and Winneconne

I am blessed with Mom’s awesome smile lines and her thick, grey hair. 

She baked apple dumplings, never drove a car, took me out in our canoe to hunt carp and cooked up wild-grape jelly that infused our tiny boathouse-cottage with tart-sweet aromas that purpled our child-smiles. Mom was etched with her laugh-lines from loving Dad and Life with a wild joy as tender as handholding under the old willow by the lake at sunset. 

Me? After graduating from college, I lived in Hawaii for twenty years where I learned to wait tables, then to write for pay. I was barely fifty years old when Mom passed on and left our little cottage too empty. 

With Max, my preteen son, I moved back to the small-town paradise of my swim-in-the sun youth, back where women fished on ice and hunted whitetails from towering tree stands, back where Max could thrive in wild and wonderful seasons. I moved... and was, and am moved, still where my smiles now etch funny furrows around my eyes and sunsets color my soul.

 I’ve returned, at last to an abundant beauty I can savor and nurture — in family, nature, traditions, my son, my fiancé, myself... that wiggles, giggles and grows perfectly old in all that wild love that made Mom smile.