Two years and two days ago I lost my best friend, and the most beautiful woman I have ever known; my mother.  Oh how I miss her.  She wore the same mantle of gentleness about her my grandmother carried as well.  I am thankful she at least got to live to see the man I would marry (whom she ADORED) and spend three years with her precious namesake, our daughter.  One of our shared stories was that after Daddy passed she and I continued the tradition of driving to Santa Fe every year.  And every year, like clockwork, I would invariably get pulled over coming home; ahem, several times.  My daddy had warned me tiny Texas towns were speed traps and to always slow WAY down.  But it is an all day drive from Santa Fe back to Dallas; when you’re on an endless stretch of road and it’s not night so you don’t have to worry about animals …  Mama and I were in a hurry each year to get to Medicine Mound for dinner at this restaurant we loved before they closed.  We always went home on Memorial Day and yes, I see the recipe brewing.  The same darn cop pulled us over EVERY SINGLE TIME.  One would think I would have known better but nope; I just kept getting busted.  We were so familiar to him that one year I had changed cars from a Trans Am to a Land Rover and he not only asked what happened to the other car, he wanted to know how I got that one.  So my mother shoots off, “We STOLE it!” and the officer leaned his blond head into her window and said, “What did you say?”  I will never forget my little mother stuck her head in like a turtle and then said again, only much more quietly and ending on a question, “We stole it?”  The officer just laughed while he issued us our annual ticket.  After we drove off I told her we could have wound up in some type of country jail with no one to help get us out.  Mama said she just couldn’t help it because he’d made her so darn mad.  She was something.  She was sweet but sassy, hilarious, and incredibly smart.  The American writer Dr. Seuss once said, “Don’t cry because it’s over.  Smile because it happened.”  My mother had the most serene smile and I will never forget my delight in college upon learning that her first name meant “The Smiling One” in Aleutian.  No name could have been more fitting.  When I close my eyes I can still see her tiny, freckled hands and hear her soft voice.  My beautiful mother; The Smiling One.