It's the first of November, All Saints' Day. We are getting closer to Thomas's anniversary and it is hard. Seven, and now eight, members of the Stryker Brigade in Afghanistan died this past week as the result of an IED. One of our fellow campaigners for the Rockville Memorial Library gave birth to a baby boy this week. She posted a picture on her Facebook page of the baby in his car seat next to his father's headstone in Arlington--it seems our hearts should break.

And then this afternoon in the grocery store, I was stopped by a woman who remembered me from our kids' early school days. Her son and Thomas had been part of a newspaper club together in elementary school but she remembered not only Thomas, but the rest of my kids as well, and asked about each of them. It was astounding and touching. But what was even more surprising was discovering that she knows one of the other Montgomery County families of the fallen involved in the library issue. Connections . . .