At 17, she was hired as a reporter – “my lifelong dream” – by the local newspaper. “I was lucky,” she wrote in 1995. “The Daily Ledger was desperate.”

“Only with my children can I traverse the outer edges of the universe and land feet first on a colored hopscotch square,” she wrote in 1994. “With my children, everything is still on the horizon, even if theirs is farther away than my own. With my children, I have wings and am never earthbound.”