Dear God It's Me, Terry

I just wanted to say thanks, wherever you are, for letting me get older and spend so many nice afternoons sitting on this sunny window seat putting off work.

Thanks for my nice husband David who still think it's funny to hold my nostrils shut while I'm sleeping.

Thanks for my  family,  the kids Carrie, then Annie, then Michael, then Dodson and Chris 'Chol-Monopoly' and Rob and Horace, and Susie-and-Kevin - and Gary of course and - the list goes on.

Thanks for the people my kids love and whom I have come to love, Christine of course and Veronica, John Magee and Ben-and-Suzanne,  then Sarah and Michael's good pals like Brynn who feels like one of ours.

Thanks for the grandbabies who are babies no longer but boys who between bouts on the play structure at McDonald's can sit and talk with you 'til you're all ready to fall down dead.

Thanks for all four pairs of black yoga pants that Old Dave hates but that get me to the gym five days a week.

Thanks for movement, and energy.

Thanks for the people in the two great organizations I volunteer time with, my town's Multicultural Network and A Better Chance - and also for my membership in the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association (OCSA) where I once had to sing "Where The Bee Sucks There Suck I" because I was assigned the part of Ariel and that's the expectation: that you sing what is obviously written as song.

Thank for expectation, which stretches us.

Thanks for this new person who will become a baby as soon as she gets done being a fetus - or a foetus as those crazy Brits say.

Thank you for my cousin Sheil and Kath who never forget me.

Thanks for my first friend, that sun and stars of my childhood days, my big sister Nan who yesterday sent a bristle of fruit from the Edible Arrangements bunch and then called me at 8am with a funny story of falling down underpants. (some karma there! she used to pull my underpants down, just for grins, when we were really little. Now the gods are loosening the elastics on hers!)

Thanks for keeping my parents safe up there in heaven, and for helping me forgive my dad who doubtless did the best he could with the tools he had to work with.

Thanks for my mom-in-law Ruth who gave me such good advice all those years, up there in Heaven now too, reunited with her young husband Ralph who died so young, younger than Actor Peter Krause is, younger than Chris Rock even.

Thanks for Uncle Ed who did not die young but is alive and joshing at 91 and comes out with me twice a week to eat food and inspect this one pond.

Thanks for that pond, and for the moon, and the wind, and food on my table.

Thanks that I can write every day and take pictures of the world with my words.

Thanks for all the pictures. Thanks for the camera that is our two eyes.