It was the best of times... @Helen DePrima and @Liz Flaherty

When we were thinking of what to write about this month, I asked Helen what she thought of using "best days" as a topic. She said she'd have to scratch her head on that one, and I'm so glad she did--her post is lovely. While you're reading, how about thinking of a best day to share with us?

by Helen DePrima

I can’t honestly identify one best or perfect day. I more recall periods in my life when all memories seem to be happy ones, disappointments or failures blurred by time and the remembered glow.

No kid ever had a happier childhood than I did, with an extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles. I had five cousins on the same farm, a stable full of horses, plus pet cats and dogs, rabbits and chickens. After I first visited Colorado at age thirteen, each summer was the high point of my year, with weeks spent at the same working ranch.

Memories of my years at the University of Colorado are bathed with the happiness of falling in love and dreaming of the future, but I still feel a bit cheated on the wedding department. My aunts did most of the planning while I was finishing my last semester at the University of Rochester. I arrived home two days before the event but my luggage didn’t; my matron of honor outfitted me for the rehearsal dinner. My new husband and I had no time for a fairy-tale honeymoon because I needed to be in Denver to take my nursing boards, so we snatched a few days at an old resort hotel across the Ohio in (I kid you not) French Lick, Indiana. Hometown of Larry Bird, if you’re a basketball fan.

Moving to Colorado was the kind of adventure I love: everything we owned crammed into a ’63 Beetle, with no idea where we might land. Westward ho! Only to spend the next year buried in a windowless surgical suite just west of Denver, dealing with skiing injuries, hiking and climbing mishaps, and weekend cowboys with less horse sense than their mounts.

After the year of OR imprisonment, the next four years in northern Colorado were pure heaven. As a Visiting Nurse, I chased up and down the Front Range and into the high country in my Beetle, seeing patients as varied as the centenarian who remembered cattle drives and gunfights on the main street to surgical follow-ups and health counseling in the migrant workers’ camps.

Moving east and becoming a stay-at-home mom after my husband graduated vet school was real culture shock, but I came to appreciate New Hampshire, especially the seacoast. Learning to sail and crewing on friends’ deep-water boats gave me the same delight I felt as a kid riding along the Little Snake River in northern Colorado.

Now my thrills are more usually on paper, or rather on the screen of my laptop – the perfect phrase, the unexpected plot turn, the new character who muscles in uninvited to steal the show. I hand over all the remembered sights and smells and sounds I’ve collected over seventy-plus years, doing my best to share my souvenirs with my readers.

by Liz Flaherty

The reason I suggested "best days" as a topic is that 46 years ago today, our daughter Kari was born. She weighed just a hair over six pounds and was 18 inches long and...oh, what a great day it was. I had two others like that, when her brothers were born. A generation later, when the grands started making their appearances, the sweetness of those seven days was different, but no less.

Another best day was in October of 1998 when Hilary Sares called from Kensington and said, "I want to buy your book." Charles's call from Harlequin several years later was every bit as exciting. To this day, I make notes with every call, and to this day I'm unable to decipher them after I hang up. 

It's snowing today, which makes me remember once after the kids had started to pull away some, not wanting to spend their time with Duane and me, when the five of us walked across the field in the snow. I don't remember why, just how precious the moments were. Another time that gave the same feeling was a long evening when the power was out and we sat around and played board games by lantern light. 

A few years back, all of us spent Thanksgiving weekend together at a rented house in Tennessee. It was all fun, but I'll never forget watching the teenagers standing around the table assembling pizzas together.

My son-in-law's mother made quilt tops before she died. I took the one Jim had and finished it and had it quilted, then presented it to him as a gift from both his moms. I was nervous about interfering with something so precious to him, but I needn't have worried. I think he knew how much both she and I love him.

My best days seem to always be wrapped around family and writing. I'm good with that.