On March 5th 2013 my beautiful, ocean eyed, seven year old son Adler was diagnosed with cancer. Stage Three kidney cancer. And, just like that, quite literally overnight, my world as I had known it heretofore cracked right down the middle exposing all my inner “seams”, and leaving every one of my edges raw and unraveling.

Since diagnosis, life has been a patchwork of sorts. Patches of progress and set backs, stitches and saline, wounds external and otherwise. And yet, amidst it all, there have been such threads of kindness. Such fibers of immeasurable goodness. Such tender mercies.

As I typed that last sentence, my minds eye took me back to long, drawn out, summer afternoons spent sitting Indian style under a quilt in progress. My Aunts, my Grandma, my mom, drinking up conversation one with another the way I did summer lemonade. How I loved listening to them. The conversation no more than an adult version of the children’s game “Marco/Polo.” One mouth speaking and another mouth answering. And so it went and so it goes even now.

Typically, their handy work was intended for someone in “need.” Someone in the midst of a downpour of their own. Never, not once, did that little grass stained girl anticipate being the “one.” And, yet, I suppose in the quilt of life, we take turns. Sometimes, we’re the hands holding out the carefully crafted patchwork and, sometimes, we’re the hands holding on to it.

It is a delight walking/running side by side with you, my fellow Moon Joggers. In so very many instances, you have been the sunshine amidst the gray. You were there long before my heartstrings unraveled and there is such comfort in that for me. Such solace to be found in the familiar. Thank you for sharing your photos, your updates, your goals and achievements. I remember reading long ago: “friends are the jewels in our crown of contentment.”