Mid-January, I was battling both rain and snow (which of course = ice) at Vermont College of Fine Arts and loving doing the picture book workshop at residency with ten students eager to learn about this quirky genre + Liz Garton Scanlon + Ashley Wolff showing us how life looks from the illustrator’s point of view. 
As I always do, I had one of my own manuscripts open–a picture book I’ve been working on–and as I sat through lectures and readings about the amazing and complicated craft of writing, I was jotting down ideas and zingy snippets that came to me. Doodling and moodling.
On a break, I listened to a voice mail from the hospice nurse who had been stopping in to visit my mom for nearly a year. “Please call me,” it said. I texted my sisters and asked someone to give me a call. “Please call me,” one of my sisters texted back, a few hours later.
Oh, Mom.
She was always so ready to go for it. So hard to pin down and box in. Such a lover of words and books. Someone whose life was saved by reading and by being intellectually curious and open to learning more, more, more.
For her memorial, we are taking donations to print the first set of Ready Set Go books in the language of Dizi, heart language of Maji, where most of my sisters and I learned to read and put down roots in this life, where we acted out stories and fell in love with the earth and life and family with its messy glories, as one of my author friends put it.
Dogs and chickens may run in front of you. The thief may take advantage of chaos. Life may slam you and knock your feet out from under you, but stories are something to cling to when everything else is shaking.
Or so it has been for us–my parents and siblings riding the rapids in the same boat.
