By SHARON RANDALL, Scripps Howard News Service

On a fine October day, one month before the coming election, I stood in a park watching my son help a young woman fill out a form.It was only a moment, enough to lock the image in memory. Then I got busy asking folks if they were registered to vote.

"Home" means different things to different people, but almost always, those things are good.Recently I wrote a column about a 7-year-old in Oakhurst, Calif., whose grandfather asked me to take part in her geography project.

Things don't always go from bad to worse. Sometimes, they actually get better.I've seen it happen often enough that I ought to expect, rather than doubt, all the things I hope for; good more than bad, happiness more than sorrow, plenty far more than want.But that is not the philosophy with which I was raised, or as I was taught to say, reared.

The mail brought a package with a notebook and a request from my friend Fred, better known as Natalie's grandpa."Please help Natalie get her Journey Journal around the world," he wrote. "It would make her smile a lot."

For reasons known only to God's grocery-store angels (they hang out by the food-sample stations and grab bites when nobody's looking), any checkout line I choose is bound to be the longest wait.

A friend e-mailed me a story she couldn't wait to tell me. She'd gone out to fetch the newspaper when she saw two little girls -- ages 5 and 7, she guessed -- all dressed up for the first day of school. And their dad was snapping their picture.

What a difference six months can make. In February, I threw a birthday party for my husband and invited a few of his co-workers -- reporters and editors and such -- to help us celebrate.

On a tediously long flight from Cleveland to Las Vegas, I pressed my nose to the window and watched in awe as flashes of lightning tap-danced across the clouds and lighted up the night sky bright as day.

For several days, off and on, every chance I get, I've been navigating a clipper ship around the tip of Cape Horn.Don't I wish that were true?Actually, it is true in a sense -- not literally, but literarily.

Fires in California. Floods in the Midwest. Four-plus dollars a gallon at the gas pump.Do you ever have a day when you wake up and think today would be a good day to hide under the porch with the dogs?I do. In fact, I probably have those days more often than I ought to admit. Today, for sure, was a hide-under-the-porch-with-the-dogs kind of day.