And now I'll go home, finished with old, dirty, boring and irrelevant cookbooks (the best of Yankee Magazine's 1988 contest, Saratoga Senior Center's cookbook from 1997) and lots of Jove paperback romances from Tupper Lake. I'm tired and I miss my brother. He would think what I do for a living is funny. I usually do too. I will go home and stare at my woods, my view that he created and think about the digging in the dirt I plan to do and it will remind me of him, always of him. The lilies I planted the year he died are coming up strong and tall this year. I will have all the privacy I need to think about him, to mourn, to laugh, to hear his guidance as I work on my gardens and figure out what to do with all that awful marjoram that's taken over everywhere. I'll explain to him this year's plan and my optimism that this, finally will work. He would find it entertaining, as would my father. I know I needed this day to mourn as well as to work with the soil, it's been a long time coming. I've been thinking of him so much and holding it all in because other things were going on. And now along with my joy will be my pain of missing him and wishing he could help me, laugh with me, guide me, share with me, boast to me--all these things about the earth, the gardens, the outdoors.

Wish me luck.