Pineknot (not to be confused with Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential retreat), it’s a nickname my father gave me. I wasn’t fond of it back then, being a girl an all. But it suits me. Did you ever try to saw through an old pine knot on a board? Or hammer a nail into one? Yeah, I am that stubborn.

I have lived something of a charmed life. My sister Gloria went to Heaven at 3 (her delicate lungs and malformed sodium channels forever fixed), I asked God to give me a brother. And He did. Chances are you will hear something about him here at PFandL.

Not so good at dating, I never expected to marry and along came Silent Bob, the most supportive and loving husband a chatty pineknot janet could ever ask for and wouldn’t you know it wasn’t long before three sons would call me Mom (or Janet, when they deemed it appropriately endearing or irritating).

I wanted nothing else.

Apparently, God did.

Before I hardly knew what to think, I was in graduate school, biology, way over my head, and for the first time able to worry about something other than the all consuming doubt of just what kind of mother I was turning out to be. If not for my own Mother this would have been a dismal failure. A woman of extraordinary talent, guts, and heart, who always dreamed of me being a hairdresser, accepted this new weird and different path, willingly opting to explore the dating options for a widowed fifty something in my children’s hometown, and moved in with us.

We are truly, best friends.

I’ll try to recycle anything including but not limited to old houses, tennis rackets, cars, and soil. I am amazed by the natural world and the one not so natural and it’s that one that is most important to me. In 2005, i joined that club, the one no one wants to be a part of one, the one of parents whose child goes to Heaven before them.

Welcome to the way a pineknot has made it this far.