You remember reading all about Robert’s Snow?
And checking out all the amazing illustrators who contributed to the cause?
Well, now’s your last chance to snag a snowflake!

(If you must know, I got outbid on the little gem I was yearning for in Auction 2 and, from the looks of Auction 3 so far, I think I may end up sans snowflake. But wahoo! Because that means that cancer’s right around the corner from being cured. Spit, spot.)

Sigh. Would that it could be so easy.
How come everything difficult has to be so, y’know, difficult?

You’d think that if enough well-intentioned folk threw themselves at anything — cancer or climate change, poverty or political ineptitude– all that was good and right would just rise to the top like cream. Wouldn’t you? Instead there are all these issues that seem just intractable, like this freakin’ war, or the drip drip drip of the polar ice cap, or the fact that my father-in-law keeps falling asleep in his chair because ten years with lymphoma‘s kind of whooped the guy. Y’know? It’s enough to make a gal a little morose.

Except that I’ve got two young hopefuls over here at my house and I’ve been telling them that the world is their oyster and I don’t want to be made a liar of. So, I’m giving myself a little lift today by thinking about just a few people making big and little differences so that the oyster we hand our kids is open and healthy and full of pearl. For example:

Jules and Eisha of Seven Impossible Things who threw a snowball in the face of Big Bully Cancer through their Blogging for a Cure effort.

Mary Lee and Franki at A Year in Reading who spend everyday teaching kids like yours and mine with love, consciousness and creativity. 

Poets like Mary Oliver and Naomi Shihab Nye and Robert Hass who help us to be mindful of the world and all its contents.

My friends and family who act out through their work, striving to educate about relationship violence through theater (Lynn), advocate for victims through the courts (Jeana), defend indigents from capital punishment (Jim), protect threatened species and their habitats (Pete), comfort the dying through hospice (Queen) and ensure a fair shot at justice for troubled youth (Deirdre), to name just a few. (And by the way, that last reference is to my aunt who’s testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow, which is kind of the big time, don’t you think?)

And let’s not forget the third graders at our school who donated more than a truck-load of blankets and kibble and bones to the Town Lake Animal Shelter and the first graders who are getting their voices in tune for their annual sing-along at the neighborhood assisted living center.

The thing is, I could go on and on and on and I’m starting to think maybe nothing’s intractable after all.

Who comes to your mind right off the bat, as a cream-rising-to-the-top make-the-world-a-better-placer?

I’m grateful for ’em…