The Partnership

There is one person who reads very nearly everything I write…well before anyone else does. She reads my draft correspondence, emails, and text messages anytime details and delivery are at stake. She reads all my creative work—my fiction, both the short and long. She read this blog. And every one which has come before. (That’s 297 blogposts, for those of you keeping track at home.)

And she doesn’t just read. She edits, she critiques, she ensures—not that the sentences are good or great, for that she leaves to me—but she ensures the sentences are not awful, not beyond hope, not in need of deletion. She rescues me from myself. And she rescues you from feeling embarrassed for me. Hers is a labor of love for us both.

So, it is on this day, the fourteenth of February, a dozen roses stand on the kitchen island for no one else but her. And it is on this day in these lines I thank her for the partnership which has spanned three decades, more than two of which have seen her at this, all too often thankless task, of reading a writer she knows too well.