My friend Lori, who you may have heard me mention around here once or twice, has given me a gift. Actually she has given me so many gifts. Actually she is gifted. Actually she is a gift.

When you start talking to Lori, when you are getting to know her, there is a phrase you may hear again and again, "I get it." She does 'get it' all of it. She gets me. She gets herself. She gets the importance of art and mothering and action and looking around and seeing. She looks, she sees, she understands. She really gets it. And then she manages to express it with her camera.


Lori does not sit around feeling overwhelmed by life and parenting. No way. She is up and out the door looking around and cooking about 10 different ideas in her head. Her home is beautiful and she changes it up every season. Her children, who sadly for my kids are not homeschooled, have that hand raised calm reasonable quality you find in children who feel safe and loved and well connected to capable grownups. They are lovely people.

This should be enough, but there is so much more. In the 20 minutes she has lived in my town - seriously, she has been here less than 6 months - she has established her family, started and runs a business, started writing two different books that are hooked up with an editor and a publisher. She runs all over the state on the weekends rafting and hiking and going to football games because that's what her family wants to do. She has dealt with about 3 major personal criseses. And she has learned to knit, which she does really well. I think that last part is a tad bit much. She could have the decency to, at least, act like a beginner. But that must be hard to do when you have already gotten it, as she so clearly does. Oh, and she is putting together a darkroom in her basement because she intends to do her own prints.

So this amazing woman has sauntered into my life. That's what she does. Lori saunters, in ripped up blue jeans and barefoot half the time also, and generally wearing diamonds too. She has sauntered into my life. And she gave me this www.lorivrba.com/katherine.exe

I cry every time I watch it. What can I say? Thank you, Lori. Thank you so much! You see me. You see my children. You see the beauty of the weird little shack where Joe and I fell in love. You put my kids on the play house he made for them there. The one I fretted over because it was too high up. Now they dwarf if. And you get that, how it represents the passage of time and the way love spent years ago still matters now.