Today Ro leaves for college. We're taking two days to drive the 12 hours, because Bob can only ride so many hours in my little clown car, plus we're not 18. My first choice for her was the well-regarded university with the strong arts program thirty minutes up the highway, but out-of-state is the best decision, when you're almost 19 and your mom still treats you like you're 12.

Somebody got an I-pod, because somebody has the best brother-in-law in the whole world. Sissy gave her the practical present, a freshman handbook of everything. We had King Ranch casserole for dinner, our national comfort food.

Got the T-shirt quilt finished at noon, all but the tying. We'll do that tonight in the motel.

If this were a movie, there would be a montage here of her growing up - but we mock montages, so I'll skip that. And as the youngest of four, with three rather older sibs, there aren't a lot of photos of just her. I'll just say that she has always been an interlude of calmness and sweetness in the midst of the others's angst - when she wasn't undergoing her own angsty moments.

You know when the realization came to me that she'd do fine at college? At the Theater Banquet, when she was awarded "Best Technician". Seeing your child's peers give her a standing ovation puts her in a new light.

She was watching "The Long, Long Trailer" while she ate lunch yessterday. Glancing up from the quilt I was racing to complete, I idly said, "You know, you can't tell from the Technicolor there, but things really were the same color they are now when I was a little girl." She cracked up.
"The Fifties", she said, in her best announcers voice "were an oddly-hued decade..."
Oh, I will miss her.