I was cleaning out my closet this weekend - a long-overdue task and not something I did for fun - when I stumbled across some things that I didn't know were in there, or had forgotten I'd put there.

First I found a ceramic cup that my friend Jan has the mate to. She and I bought them together to toast our new-found friendship nearly 12 years ago. We met on AOL when they still had bulletin boards to post to. We met on the Children's Writers board and discovered we were both planning to attend a writing workshop in Wildacres, North Carolina. We decided we would be roommates at the event, and we have been dear friends ever since. The second summer that we attended the retreat, we drove into the nearest town. It's called Little Switzerland and it sits high on a mountain (okay, a mountain for North Carolina) and is full of adorable shops that feature goods by local artists. That's where we found the cups. We called them our "ceremonial goblets" and we drank a lot of wine out of them for the next two summers. Jan now lives in Massachusetts (she lived in upstate New York when I met her), and we still talk regularly, though Wildacres no longer offers a children's writers' retreat. She and I are thinking of starting our own.

I found a baby blanket that my great-grandmother quilted for me. My great-grandmother lived to be 87 years old. She came to America from Hungary at the turn of the last century. She raised my grandmother and my great-aunts and uncle as a single mother during the early 1920s. She taught me to crochet during my summer visits beginning when I was about eight. The last few days of her life, I remember watching her as she sat in overstuffed chair in the hospital room,.. her eyesight devoured by cataracts, but her fingers nimbly working thread and hook to create a doily the size of a dinner plate. She would mutter to herself and sing songs from the old country, not knowing I was sitting just 10 feet away. Her loss left a hole in my heart that causes me to spend hundreds of dollars and hours of time on projects that involve crochet hooks or knitting needles.

Behind my cedar chest, which sits inside my closet, I found a book of quotes that I received as a gift for serving on a committee. One of my favorite quotes from this book, called "Witty, Wicked, & Wise: A Book of Quotations About Women" would have to be this one from the great dancer Margot Fonteyn:

"Take your work seriously, but never yourself."

On the very back

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