Caro: "Bite me." Ruby: "I gave that up in kindergarten.

If she wasn't careful, she'd slide without a ripple into the gently flowing stream of her old life, pulled back under the current without a wimper of protest. Another housewife lost in the flow.

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

Books + friendship = book club

Nobody's strong enough to be a parent. We just do it, blindly, going forward on faith and love and hope. That's all it is...Being afraid...and going on.

No mother. Two small words, and yet within them lay a bottomless well of pain and loss, a ceaseless mourning for touches that were never received and words of wisdom that were never spoken. No single word was big enough to adequately describe the loss of your mother.

They would always be a family, but if she'd learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.