By SHARON RANDALL, Scripps Howard News Service

Call your brother, don't lose touch. Those were the last words my mother said to me. I remember thinking that day years ago, standing by her bed, "He's my brother. Why on Earth wouldn't I call him?"I didn't know then what I know now. Recently we had a fight, my brother and I.

What will you remember about your father?I've heard it said that our earliest memory holds the key to the defining issue of our lives -- that it answers the question we long most to resolve.I once told that to someone who said his earliest memory was trying to suck his own toes.

I felt like a pioneer, blazing a trail across the desert.Sweat rolled from my brow and dripped off my nose. My mouth was dry as desert sand. My knees creaked. My hip hurt. My hands got all puffy. And the soles of my feet felt hotter than the devil's toenails.But I pressed on, putting one smoky foot in front of the other.

It started two months ago. I was folding laundry when I heard a noise -- a rustle and a scratching -- just outside the bedroom window.Granted, I'm not what you'd call a birder. Books are filled with all I don't know about birds. But it didn't take an Audubon to figure out a bird was building a nest on our roof.

Before going to Fort Smith, Ark., last week to speak at a fund-raiser for the local library, I received a note from one of the town's residents, apologizing for the fact that she couldn't be on hand to greet me personally.

I blame it on the earrings. Pearls like to sneak up on you.At a scholarship night at Monterey (Calif.) High School, I sat in the cafeteria recalling a lifetime of sports banquets and a whole lot of spaghetti dinners.

For Mother's Day, I bought myself a gift. Not because my children won't remember me. They will, of course. I remind them so they can't forget.I bought myself that gift for several reasons. First, I love to be surprised, don't you?

In fifth grade, when I was 11 years old, I got flung headlong off a runaway merry-go-round.As formative events go, it ranks pretty high. Skidding 50 yards across a playground, I learned a painful lesson: When life moves too fast, you need to slow it down or you could lose all the skin off your backside.

Outrun a train. Outsmart a cow. Make a plan, any plan, to get by. Games I played as a child were all about survival.Isn't that what life is about?When I was 7, my family and I lived in a cinderblock house beset on all sides by hazards.In front, a major highway rumbled like thunder with logging trucks and big rigs hurrying to and from the mills.

Sometimes, when you think you've lost something forever, it shows up like a stray dog and starts licking your face.And all you can do is laugh.Two years ago, I walked out of the house that for 35 years had been my home. In that house, I had reared three children, lost a husband to cancer and spent seven years as a widow before deciding to remarry.