And suddenly, everything changed.

Ainsley only just turned 11, and I know adulthood is still years away.

But for the rest of my days, when I look back on the summer of 2013, I will see it as the summer when my little girl grew up.

Some of the changes were physical. We had to go bra shopping and have discussions about how to shave. (Some of you know that I am not the best role model for this, but I'm all she's got. Let the tourniquets begin.)

Others were more subtle. Her sarcasm has become more frequent (and more annoying, because it's generally aimed at me.) She's been a little more moody, a little more dramatic. The first month of summer, all she wanted to do was run and play outside. By the final weeks, all she wanted to do was text her friends and read or watch Harry Potter. Particularly the third movie, which is arguably the one where you realize, "Hey. These kids are no longer kids." How fitting.

Her metamorphosis shouldn't have been surprising. She just started 6th grade, after all, and that is officially middle school. In-Between Land. The horrifying time in a young person's life when she has one foot in the shimmering world of adolescence and the other firmly stuck in the quicksand of teenagery. She's young for her grade, though, and I thought we might get one more year of true, joyful childhood from her before crossing that bridge.

Alas, she outgrew herself right on schedule.

So this Christmas will be the first Christmas that Santa doesn't come. And, she claims, the first Halloween with no tricks or treats. (I can't help but think the lure of chocolate will change her mind.)  For her birthday, the only requested item in the "toy" column was a Magic 8 Ball. The main thing she wanted for her 11th was to have her best friend over to eat pizza and watch a movie.

Goodbye, Chuck E. Cheese. Hello, girls' nights in.

With so much innocence lost, I feel more compelled than ever to cherish those rare moments when I look at her and see the little girl beneath the slimming face, deepening voice, and abandonment of childish things.

One day this summer I checked on her while she was taking a post-swim-practice nap. It's been years since she last napped regularly, but two-a-day swim practices made them a necessity for several weeks this season. In her dark and quiet room, decorated with black curtains and neon-bright peace symbols, I found her curled on her side, holding her precious stuffed elephant tightly under her chin.

In sleep, she wasn't talking back to me. Or rolling her eyes. Or being moodily sarcastic. Her flushed cheeks and deep breathing took me back to her toddler days, when a shared nap was our favorite hour of any summer day. In that moment, she was my sweet little girl again. The one who watched The Goodnight Show on PBS Sprout every night. The one who danced to Wiggles songs and asked me to play Laurie Berkner CDs in the car. The one who wanted to be a different Disney Princess each year for Halloween and who believed wholeheartedly that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.

I knew the moment, like childhood, was a fleeting joy. So I did what any nostalgic mom would do.

I gently wiped her damp hair from her forehead. I brought her summer quilt up to cover her chilled knees. I kissed her flushed cheeks.

And then I grabbed my phone to take a picture.

For if I've learned nothing else this summer, I've learned that the sweetest moments of childhood are gone before you know it. Grab them while they last.

Checking the obituary section of Facebook

A member of my graduating class from high school died yesterday. It was not me. This time.

When you're relatively young and someone you know who's exactly your age dies, your own mortality raises its weaselly little head and says, "Boo." It's like coming home from work and finding Death's business card tucked into your front door.

Was in the neighborhood today and thought I'd check in. Will be in touch.

He was not a friend, but in the small high-school I went to, our circles crossed from time to time. Our last names were close enough alphabetically that if an unimaginative teacher sat us in this order, we were seated together. In our very small music appreciation and theory class our senior year, we walked over to class in the adjacent middle school together every morning, commenting on the weather.

He was kind of a goofball. The kind of big, lumpy guy who would say or do things in class that made everyone make "WTF?" faces at each other before we knew what WTF faces were. Though it wasn't like we were laughing at him; he was in on the joke.

And now he's gone.

The details are fuzzy, but it seems to have been an accident. A senseless accident that has everyone scratching their heads. As if there's any other kind.

It had Facebook buzzing for a while. But then, because we had all lost touch with the deceased, we went about our day.

"How sad," we said.

"Too young."

"He will be missed."

His family will miss him and mourn his untimely death deeply. My heart breaks for them. But can we, who talked about him today from the comfortable distance of texts and social media, miss someone we only thought about when reminiscing about our high-school days? I think it's more likely that his death affected us all today because it made us feel our age and our vulnerability. Death knocked on the door, and it wasn't for one of our parents or grandparents. It was for one of us.

My mother used to talk about how she subscribed to her hometown newspaper after we moved to northern Kentucky simply to keep up with the growing number of friends and former classmates who were dying. I found it morbid. But that was before Facebook, and today's circle of "Did you hear?" announcements was no different really than Mom checking the obituary section of The Advocate every week and immediately calling her fellow ex-pats.

"Remember so-and-so? He died last week."

How sad. Too young. He will be missed.

I imagine I will be reading these words a bit more frequently now. And fearing each time that my number is up next.

Never send to know for whom the Facebook tolls; it tolls for thee.

All Good Things

Well...the house is now someone else's.

As with all things having to do with my childhood home, the path was neither smooth nor expected. A week before the scheduled closing, our agent called and was like, "Hey, you're not going to believe this, but there has been a mess-up and the closing is actually tomorrow and not next week. Surprise!" And after the artery in my right temple stopped throbbing, my sister and I agreed to let it go early. Sadly, though,  we didn't really get the goodbye with the house we were planning.

But what the hell. I met my childhood best friend for one final blue Icee walk and we stood out in the driveway and giggled for a couple of hours the night before the closing, and for a just a little while I was twelve again. That's really all the goodbye I needed, I suppose.

The girl (sorry, young woman) who bought my childhood home looked twelve herself when I met her, and I was tempted to ask her where she was planning on parking her Big Wheel when she moved in. Smartly, though, I stopped myself and simply wished her the best. She's getting a good house. A good home.

A chapter in my life has ended. A chapter in hers has just begun.

May her story in that house be a happy one. All things considered, mine was. A comedy, even, in the end.

Goodbye, house.

Food (stamps), glorious food (stamps.)

Where is it, where is it...ah! Here it is! My soapbox. Just let me blow the dust off...there we go. And now we step up to the mic...it's all coming back to me now! Testing, 1, 2, 3...ooh, hot mic. Hot mic.

Today I want to talk to you about food stamps. Or for the young and hip, EBT cards, which I hear they're calling them these days.

Are we uncomfortable yet? Good. It's a touchy subject. And one that social media has forced me to open my mouth about.

In the couple of years I've been addicted to  using Facebook, I've seen several of my friends make comments about food stamps. Most of them have been jokes about the stereotypical food-stamp user at the store who uses them to buy junk food while talking on an iPhone with manicured nails. The gist is always that someone made a choice there to get an expensive phone and an unnecessary beauty treatment while hard-working taxpayers are buying this person's Cheetos.

I've let it go. I could comment, but that's a battle I know I can't win.

But recently someone posted that he was having hamburger for dinner while welfare moms were using their EBT cards to treat themselves to steak. And I felt something in my soul go, "Poof."

And once my soul implodes, I can't keep my mouth shut.

It's been on my mind for a while, and I initially really, really wanted to speak my mind in the comments section of that post. In a nice way. And let the original poster know that not everyone who uses food stamps abuses the system, and that the face he is associating with this program is a very different face from the one I know.

Because it's my face. And my mother's face.

But Facebook isn't the forum for that. This probably isn't, either. But I don't have a news show on MSNBC or Fox News, so this is about the best I can do.

So here it is, my rant on food stamps/EBT and government assistance programs in general.

Had you been behind my mother in the checkout line of the Barbourville A & P in the late winter of 1984, you would have seen a smartly-dressed woman with manicured nails pull food stamps out of her Aigner leather bag to pay for her Coke, some cranberry juice, Campbell's soup, and canned tuna. Oh, and maybe a Snickers bar. What would your judgement have been, had you seen this?

Here's the full story.

The woman, who you might have assumed was taking handouts she didn't need while you were working your butt off and paying for it with your tax dollars, was a beautician working three jobs, including one in a well-respected beauty shop on the court square in Barbourville. People walked in and wanted to be made beautiful by someone who looked like they knew what they were doing. Therefore, my mother scoured clearance racks in department stores for hours for the rare pair of almost-designer pants marked down to below $10. The nail girls in her shop kept her nails looking nice for free when she didn't have the time to paint them herself. She had just moved back to the area and didn't have a lot of clientele, so looking professional to try to snag new clients was important. She changed into old clothes before doing cheap shampoo-and-sets at the nursing home or cutting hair out of her own tiny 3-room apartment for friends and family who couldn't afford to visit her shop and who sometimes tipped her in cigarettes or small gifts of pens and notebooks for her young daughter.

The designer leather bag that caught your eye was a hand-me-down bought for a few dollars at one of her wealthy aunt's notoriously awesome yard sales.

The woman's daughter was sick a lot that winter and sick a lot in general. Every winter she got a sinus infection that made her lose her appetite and drop to a dangerously low weight. The mother often bought junk foods, like Coke or Snickers bars or Ruffles potato chips to try to get her sickly little girl to eat whatever sounded good just to get some calories. She didn't have much time to cook for her daughter with three jobs, and canned tuna and canned soup allowed her child to be able to feed herself.

Before she applied for food stamps, during this separation from her husband who was paying not one dime to her, her child sometimes went to bed hungry. There was food down the street at the little girl's Mamaw's, but she was elderly and on a fixed income and couldn't provide every meal and snack for the both of them.

There was a lot of macaroni and cheese made with government commodity cheese served in Mamaw's trailer.

Of course that woman was my mother. Who was embarrassed every time she pulled those stamps out of her purse to pay for something we needed. Who cried the day she went to the welfare office to apply for them. Who eventually went back home to live with her alcoholic husband because she couldn't afford not to.

Does the system get abused? Absolutely. But don't assume that the person you see using them is abusing them because she is well-dressed, or has nice nails, or is buying name-brand potato chips.

Or even steak.

That May, when we were packing up at the end of the school year to move back home, my mom wanted us to spend all of the food stamps we had left on my Mamaw to stock her fridge. We wouldn't need them anymore. She sent me to the grocery store with one of her friends and a list of my grandmother's favorites, which Mamaw couldn't afford to always buy herself. On that list was 2 t-bone steaks. My Mamaw had never in her life had a skillet-grilled steak until about a year before, when times were better for Mom and she bought and cooked one for Mamaw for dinner. She loved it, of course. So we used our last food stamps, in part, to treat her and my aunt to one again. As a thank-you for all they had done for us while we lived there.

And when my mom's friend did the math and told me there was enough left for 2 Snickers bars, I got them. And one of my favorite memories of me and my mother is sitting on the front stoop of our cruddy apartment on our last night there, eating chocolate, sharing a glass bottle of Coke, and knowing that that time of our lives was behind us. And that, God-willing, we would never again feel ashamed at the grocery store.

So there you go. It's easy to generalize. It's easy to judge. But when you put a human face on it...well, maybe the next time you feel your dander rise because the person in front of you paying with an EBT card, and you start scrutinizing their cart, and checking out their clothes and hands and accessories, you will be a little more forgiving. And not assume you know that person's story. We so rarely know someone's story.

End rant.

Playing With Lead

There's just been so much talk about Angelina Jolie's boobs that it's been impossible for me to not think about them this week.

Ask any cancer survivor and my guess is he or she completely agrees with Mrs. Pitt's decision to have a preventative surgery. If any of us could have looked into an crystal ball and seen our future diagnoses, we would have done whatever was in our power to not get that phone call. Including having beautiful body parts cut off. And given her family history and genetic testing results, Angelina was pretty close to being able to look in a crystal ball.

It's gotten me thinking about what crazy cell mutation caused me to develop Hodgkin's lymphoma a decade ago. Was it my genes or my environment? And how do I make sure I protect Ainsley from it?

From everything I've read and everything I've been told, there aren't good answers for these questions for the type of cancer I had. No current genetic test can predict its likelihood, no solid hereditary link has been found. That my mother died of lymphoma's cousin leukemia is interesting to my oncologist, but even he shrugs when I ask if this means Ainsley is more at risk than the average bear. Maybe; maybe not.

The Magic 8 Ball says, "future uncertain."

When I look back at my past, I can remember some choices and behaviors that, if not caused my cancer, certainly didn't help my physical health on the cellular level. Stupid things that seemed not a big deal when I was young, but are horrifying to me as an adult.

Here's why I got cancer. Maybe.

1. As a small child, I once got a thermometer out to play with (unsupervised, of course) and bit into it on accident, breaking it in my mouth. I spat out the foul-tasting substance that had been inside the thermometer, rinsed out my mouth, hid the evidence, and did not confess to my parents. Was it red alcohol or silver mercury inside that old thermometer? I honestly can't remember. Since I'm alive and gave birth to a child without birth defects, I'm leaning toward alcohol, but who knows? I have a mouthful of old mercury fillings, so I can't completely rule out mercury as a culprit in general.

2. In high-school chemistry class I played with some lead pellets. They were BB-sized and spread flat in a large dish in one corner of the lab and they felt really cool to rub my palms over while waiting for our experiment to start. A friend saw me playing with them and told me I probably shouldn't be touching them, and when I rolled my eyes at him he asked our teacher, "Hey, what would happen if someone were to play with this dish of lead pellets back here?" To which she responded, "That person would get cancer and have mutant babies." I stopped, but the damage was maybe already done.

3. My parents both smoked in the car with me in it with the windows rolled up. You can say what you want about second-hand smoke not being irrefutably proven to cause cancer, but breathing it during 3-hour car rides to Barbourville in the winter (in a small Chevy Cavalier, no less) cannot have helped. Especially that one time that, for reasons I cannot explain, I kept licking the yellow nicotine coating on the inside of my car window. (I might have been a weird little kid.)

4. I did not wear sunscreen until I was 17 years old. Seriously. Like, ever.

5. I went through an adolescent stage where I ate Penrose hot pickled sausages by the jar. On purpose.

6. As a young adult and new homemaker, I used the following products to clean different things in my home without gloves or proper ventilation: Tarn-X, Easy-Off, CLR, Lime Away, and Ajax. At least two of those had warning labels that said they contain compounds that have been shown in the state of California to cause cancer. Thank God they don't cause cancer in Kentucky!


I talk to friends sometimes about how much more today's kids are bubble-wrapped and protected than we were. I am one of these parents, so I don't judge them. But I catch myself saying things like, "Our parents didn't worry about this stuff, and we turned out just fine!" And then a second later I realize that, well, maybe not so fine after all. I mean, I'm healthy now and not even all the people I work with know that I'm a cancer survivor. But that all could have worked out badly for me. I could have been a statistic. So, you know...maybe erring on the side of caution isn't a bad thing. For one of the world's most beautiful women, the side of caution meant a double mastectomy. For you, it might be putting down the Marlboros or choosing SPF 30 over the Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil. (Oh my God, do you remember how that stuff smelled? I mean, in the moment before it allowed you to get pre-melanoma? At least I smelled awesome while my pigment cells were mutating.)

And, when given the choice...please don't play with the lead.

And now for something completely different.

Remember when I started this blog and I was going to use it primarily to talk about books, since talking about books is a big part of my job? Ha, ha! I was so cute. I should have known me better.

But today, an honest-to-goodness librarian post about a book that came up as part of a discussion on my state librarian email chain about why we weed out-of-date, inaccurate, and irrelevant books from our collections on a regular basis. Our patrons sometimes get angry that we are throwing perfectly good books away, and it helps to be able to show them an example. And this is one hell of an example.

If you've ever wondered why we librarians can't keep every book we and our predecessors have ever bought on our shelves for all eternity, even if we have plenty of empty space, I give you exhibit A, discovered on her picture book shelves by an elementary librarian her first year on the job less than a decade ago:

Epaminondas and His Auntie.

When you open the link, look off to the left where it says "View the book." Take a moment and read it.

Did you catch the old-timey racism with a side of animal cruelty? (Maybe not racism so much as naive and offensive racial stereotyping, but why split hairs?)

And this is why librarians weed their collections. Times change, attitudes change, and even facts change. (Exhibit B: the planet formerly known as Pluto.) Even fiction can become irrelevant and, yes, distasteful.

The more you know. (Insert network logo and theme music here.)

She's brave. She's brilliant. And she's back.

In case you haven't heard, Allie Brosh is back with a new Hyperbole and a Half post. If you have ever struggled with depression, please go read it. I'll wait.

It makes my depression post from over a year ago seem timid. It took a lot of courage for Allie to not only talk about her debilitating depression, but to frickin' draw it. Some of her drawings hit so close to my own experiences that they were painful to see.

That graphic of her in a coffee shop in her hoodie giving stank eye to the non-depressed people enjoying their coffee? That was me every morning that I stopped at Stabucks over my spring break before heading to my mother's. I couldn't understand how people could be happy while I was sitting there gathering enough strength to go clean my dead mother's kitchen.

Since my mother died, depression has reared its ugly head twice--once about a month after she died, and then again this winter and spring. Like the other times in my life when I've had it, I  first was weepy, then numb, then obsessed with planning my own funeral and wishing I could just close my eyes and go away.

It's a slow and uphill climb, but I'm getting better. I wish for Allie, and all who find themselves swimming in the depths, to eventually be able to climb out.

And I thank her for being open and honest. It makes it so much easier for the rest of us to come forward and join the club.