A R C O . I R I S
… Could have been. Astronaut, seamstress, interior decorator. Tractor driver, mechanical engineer, department store cashier. Could have been a sky diver. A manicurist. Librarian. Could have been. I

O R U G A
...It's the month of September that calls me back to my ink and paper. It's a golden afternoon, lazy and long-shadowed with gnats meandering and Maggie marauding. It's the puzzle on the cherry wood table and the candy corn and the school supplies. It's the distant flute working intervals and a neighbor's dachshund roughhousing with the dirt. It is autumn.Autumn, and I need a sign. Some kind of figurative reassurance that it's okay for me to be a work in progress. And then I see it--there on the pavement edging toward the gutter, a tiny, endearing, fuzzy caterpillar. On my way to AP Music Theory, I stop in my tracks, grinning. My hands find their way to my hips while