“Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.”...said to be an "Eskimo proverb" Profound thoughts get thought, seems to me, where the nights are deep & cold.

"How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems," said Daniel Webster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Webster

So, it appears that Almanzo James Wilder, (1857-1949) and Vicki Grove's mom, Mrs. Baum of Lincoln, MO, both passed out of the world through the door marked October 23. Bess, a.k.a. Laura Ingalls Wilder of Mansfield, MO, surely did portray her husband as a solid chap, boy & man. Not for the longest time, when I was a kid, would I read about him. Why would I want to read about a boy? Turned out that "Farmer Boy," would be my favorite of all of L.I.W.'s books. I reveled, virtually, in the apple pie and everything else Almanzo's hard-working mom, Angeline, served up in the Wilders' home near Malone, NY www.almanzowilderfarm.com/ (way up by the Canada border. Thanks to my dear, cool, amazing, tomboy, dog-rescuing, bagpipe-playing, swell writer friend Natalie Kinsey-Warnock of Vermont, http://www.kinsey-warnock.com/ (have you read her 'The Night the Bells Rang"? Go and do so. I LOVE that little book, even more than her fine and better-known The Canada Geese Quilt.) got to visit the wonderfully restored Wilder Farm. Do go there if you haven't.

And, as I was saying before I got off the rails, one of my very best friends in this here vale of tears, Vicki Grove http://mowrites4kids.drury.edu/authors/grove/ lost her 88-year-old mom yesterday, after a long, heroic and steadfast stint as caretaker of both her parents, while managing to turn out a steady stream of thoughtful, careful prose, being as she is, a genuine, daily writer. "Destiny," I think, is one of my favorite V.G. books, though I was mighty taken w/ "Rhiannon," her historical novel.... Anyway, old Mrs. Baum finally got her ticket punched & passed to the Blue Beyond. Maybe she'll get to meet the great Daniel Webster. His deathday is today, October 24 (1852). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Webster