Stick Horse Cowgirls

I have been plagued with pink eye for about four days now. I've been working through it, explaining to clients that my refusal to shake their hands is out of consideration for their own eyes; trying to convince them that, no, I have not been on a three-day drunk. If that were the case then, surely, both eyes would be equally bloodshot. It's been okay, but certainly I have not been working up to par. In addition to having a watery, itchy, sore, unsightly left eye, I am also feeling very like flu coming on. It is that achy feeling riding just beneath the surface of the skin. Still, duty calls, and I have gamely persevered through work--until yesterday. Yesterday morning I had a short hearing in a court two counties away which means a little over an hour's drive. When I arrived, the usual schmoozing lawyers were gathered in the judge's chambers to preview the docket and glad hand and gossip. I walked in and "Whoa!" was the exclamation. Someone said, "Who cl...

When my husband and I married, he was 20 and I was 18. Like almost everyone that age, we were full of dreams and ideas about what life would look like for us in the upcoming years. None of these dreams and ideas looked bad--we had only "good" dreams of success. No one plans to have failures. One element of our initial plan was that we would have no children. We were wildly in love and very ambitious. We were both in college, working a full-time job. We were busy, mainly with school and carefree fun--unfettered by diaper-changing or trying to arrange babysitting we could not afford. Both of us had our eyes on prizes. I knew graduate school of some kind was in my future (although the law school idea came on me about the time I graduated from college). My husband never finished his degree, but plunged into the entrepreneurship which would become his hallmark. He was successful at it in the sense that his whole adulthood he was able to work at things about which he was momentaril...