Thanks, Jerry!

Jerry B. is mom's best friend she's known the longest and it was Jerry who actually fashioned her life's path for her, unconsciously. They met in 1975, after mom moved to Atlanta after a year spent meditating, half of it on top a mountain overlooking Arosa, Switzerland! Where - although she did not discover enlightenment - she discovered something betta: Toblerone White Chocolate.

Mom was maybe 18...Well, Jerry was an avid birdwatcher, folksinger, and genuine Woodstock hippie! When he and his friends, Steve and wife Sharon would take off down to the Okeefenokee Swamp or the west coast of Florida for EPIC birdwatching trips, mom just tagged along. She learned a lot about Jerry on their trips together, like how he don't like 'gaters coming up outta the swamp alongside the canoe he in! Mom saying: "Don't you HIT THAT THING with your paddle, you'll tump over the canoe and it'll eat ME, TOO!" But mainly she learned about birds. How to watch them. How to discover the world around her through them

And when she became a wildlife photographer and outdoor writer and environmental educator and blah, blah, and more blah, it was always with the memory of those early days mucking about swamps and dark, shadowy places beneath overhanging moss that inspired her.

One day Jerry sent this picture to mom. She used to give him photography but when she stopped that she started drawing funny pictures. Who knew he kept them? When he sent her this pic - and we may have posted it - hard to know without a memory, but he sent this and kept saying, "You need to sell your work."

So, tonight she finally making those guinea pig cards she been talking 'bout ad nauseum and missing Jerry. Not too long ago after someone really hurt her feelings, they were talking (he still in Hot'Lanta) and he said something she had never heard before from a guy, he said: "Awwww...Chana, I really wish I could've been there for you."

And that, dear friends, was the most beautiful gift of all.