So it's a hokey holiday. All those mushy cards. All that cold coffee and burned toast served on makeshift trays to tired mothers who would prefer to skip breakfast and sleep just a little longer. All the overpriced flowers that are dead in two days and perfumes that smell like bug spray and sweaters that are too big and pants that are too tight and housewares that you never use…

It's my fault. I always liked them too much. I never understood when people said, "Aren't you glad vacation is over?" or "Oh, no, another snow day. The kids are home again.” Even when they were small and awoke ready to play in the middle of the night, even when they cried every time I attempted to go out, I always thought how lucky…

She has always rebounded. That's the thing. Push her down and she comes popping back like one of those weighted inflatable toys that kids can punch but can never topple over. She has persisted like the Energizer Bunny, and rallied like the Six Million Dollar Man, and though life has taken her breath away, time and time again, it has never been able to stop her. Just one more trip to the hospital. Just one more close call. Just one more step back from the starting line, but that's okay because we've been here before…

The masks stumped everyone. They were beautiful, artfully decorated, thoughtful, clever representations of who we are. They had been our pre-party assignment. Ellen had bought them, full-faced white things, and given them to us with instructions to decorate them, in secret, in a way that would say something about our inner selves.  We were then to bring our finished product hidden in a paper bag to her annual neighborhood ladies night…

BANFF SPRINGS, Alberta - I am watching the clouds roll by. Literally.

Pale pink in some places, bruise blue in others, they are thick, substantial things, far more lethargic than clouds generally are. They have draped themselves across the mountains. They hug the craggy tops and cling to the creviced sides and linger there…

Before they arrived, summer lived outside my window. I could see it, but I couldn't feel it. Even when I cut the grass, even when I walked barefoot early in the morning, even when I unleashed Molly and let her race down the path and across the football field, even as I raced with her, grass and woods and sky our only companions, summer didn't touch…

he wouldn't let them into her house. She stood on her dilapidated porch, in the middle of a well-kept neighborhood, her back to the door and insisted that she was fine, that they could go, and that she was going nowhere.

She was 82. She lived alone on the first floor…

I have never called her “Mother.” She isn't my mother. She's my mother-in-law.

Such an awkward, stiff word, as if the law is binding us, as if the vows her son and I took nearly three decades ago are our sole connection.

We had nothing in common when we met