By SHARON RANDALL, Scripps Howard News Service

It was a rare, rainy weekend in the desert with lightning crackling across the sky and wind whipping the palm trees until they reared like horses.

My husband and I had just finished cleaning up the debris from the last storm when out of nowhere, another storm struck.

On my mother's birthday -- her 84th, had she lived -- I called my brother to remind him that he's still her favorite, though he is hopelessly pigheaded.

As if he needs reminding.

Joe never forgets anything. Our mother used to say it was because he was born blind, that God gave him a great memory to make up for his loss of sight.

On a flight from Las Vegas to Sacramento, Calif., while my husband got lost in a book, I sucked on the ice from my Diet Pepsi and tried to estimate the capacity of the average human heart.

How much can it hold? How far will it stretch? How many times can it break and mend?

In my next life, I want to be an appliance repairperson.

Actually, what I'd prefer to do is not the repairs, which can be messy, but the diagnosis of the problem that needs fixing.

I think I'd be good at it. Lord knows there's no shortage of problems that need diagnosing and fixing. And I don't just mean with appliances.

Home means different things to each of us. To some, it's a state; to others, it's a state of mind.
For me, it's like a jigsaw puzzle with ever-changing pieces that I keep fitting together to feel whole.

My sister and I have a little private joke that we share, thanks to our mother and her sister, God rest their souls.

Things change. Not always for the better, not necessarily for the worse. We don't get much choice about it.
The question is not which we'd like better -- the old way or the new -- but how we can make the best of what we've got.

I don't know how you spend your spare time. But what I'm about to tell you -- and I will probably regret it later -- is typical of how I spend mine.
It started when I got hungry. Well, not hungry, exactly. I had just eaten a pile of leftovers for lunch. Never mind what they were. They needed to be eaten, so I ate them. The point is, how hungry could I have been?

Sometimes we get to say thanks in unexpected ways.
For weeks, I was hoping to see a baby quail. It's not like I went out looking for one with a pair of binoculars and the North American Field Guide to Cute Little Things. But when you live around quail -- as we do, in the desert outside Las Vegas -- you hope to see quail babies.

His name was Ray. We were in fifth grade, but he was older, held back a few years.
A big, quiet boy with clear blue eyes, he sat alone at the back of the room, bothering no one, asking nothing, staring out the window or at the clock.
When he wasn't staring, he liked to draw horses -- wild horses running like the wind.