Another summer flying its leading strings into fall. I leave for Nova Scotia, which is where my mind's eye always lives. The squirrels in the back are stuffing their mouths with entire green apples and the chipmunk's cheek is bursting with stolen bird seed. In the pond are our Koi -- now 37 inches and 35 pounds staring and staring, taken with its own reflection in the mirror and the tadpole, now half frog, arranges its long legs around the driftwood in the pond.

Yesterday, we harvested the leaf lettuce (only 4.5 ounces) but still green and fresh and tender, that plus 20 long green beans makes a salad that tastes like summer. I've given up on the cherry tomatoes, I jealously watch them and wait for the perfect moment of ripeness, when "swish," they disappear. I've only had three so far, and one of those wasn't really ripe.

As with the vegetables, so with QUEST. The harvesting of long, loved faces, both cheers and saddens. Two brothers, (I've known them for over 10 years. One wrote a poem whose first line was "I am small, but strong.") And strong he is, though not small anymore. They are leaving me and the city. One going off to MHVC in Utica, the other to SUNY in Albany. This is as it should be, moving day comes and I proudly wave goodbye. We break the cord between us, but hopefully just a pinch of remembrance remains, enough to draw us together again at some point at some future time. Someone says he wants to come back and join our board. I would so love to have him but only when and if he's seen and conquered all he needs to. Or almost all, you must always have a little in reserve. We all need some mystery and magic in our lives.

Nothing, and I mean nothing makes me happier than my chickens coming back to roost, however briefly.

I always feel that the real start of the year is the school year. And true to form, I am doing some restructuring. Rearranging, programs, staff, sites, hours, sweeping, sweeping looking for QUEST's sorcery moments of transformation. Starting a tap-dancing class, a serious journalism program taught by The Gazette's very own Kathleen Moore. Maybe resurrecting a basketball offering but in another place, another part of town. There's not much going on on Van Vranken Avenue, except crime, that is. Maybe a small sports program there. Lots of kids, hopefully lots of kids and families interested in a serious basketball program comprised with a summer intensive sport camp. It's exciting and scary, but times change and QUEST has to move and change and go where it's needed.

A QUEST investigative newspaper online or in hard copy would be a commitment to youth political awareness. I personally like the idea of editorial cartoons.

Connecting with a nationwide disability group that will come to QUEST to train families and help us through the legal and social mazes we all need to walk through in order to get results.
I'd like to send kids to city council meetings to observe and report communities in action. I'd like to be more involved in voter registration. I would like to heal racial divisiveness on both sides of the fence.

Oh, and I'd like my own building and $5 million while we're fantasizing. How much of this will we accomplish? Don't know, priorities shift, needs change, new ideas are always fermenting and (as you probably already know) not all ideas come to fruition. But if half my seeds blossom, I will feel as new as the season.

I sit now and remember old friends. Fred Kindle comes immediately to mind. Someone mentioned him to me lately, telling me how proud Fred was of QUEST and voila, his wife Katy called the next day. Katy, in her 80s, making do without her lifelong friend and Friday night companion champagne drinker. Katy, chipper and intent on knowing, "What we were up to at QUEST?"

That brought to mind Gail George, gone a year and a half but not really because she is with me whenever I wear her gold necklace. This amazing piece of jewelery is straight from one of her many visits to the East; it adorns my neck whenever I need a boost. It is my secret weapon, and I use it wisely and wear it proudly, as I will on the Schenectady Today Show with Ann Parillo.

And yesterday, I ran into Pat Caselli, a friend from trillions of light years ago. We bump into one another frequently at the bank. She is a stalwart warrior. Husband dead of brain cancer, she fighting colon cancer for many years now. I noticed her ankle swollen and black and blue and Pat sporting a serious limp. Fearing the worst, I tentatively ask if she's OK. She chuckles, "I was too exuberant in the last dance class I took," She said. All her life, she has been a dancer and she will continue dancing her way into eternity.

I have been blessed with amazing compatriots along the life road I travel. They put all those super heroes and heroines behind the starting gate. These people get it on. And they travel with me as baggage that is essential to my well being.

I am off to Nova Scotia to live in a one-room cabin with no running water and a wood stove, but it has electricity, four walls of windows and is in the middle of 100 acres of woods and sits out over a small lake.

Loons and herons and eagles and hawks. Coyotes and otters and beavers. Owls hooting, black bears too, and 23 new books to read and my faithful companion -- my dog, Bert.

Happy Trails to you.
Until we meet again.