"Waiting for Pat was like waiting for the music to start," write the editors of Fireflies at Twilight: Letters from Pat Adams. A true Aquarian-age woman, Pat was equally comfortable swinging a hammer on a building crew, gardening at home, or working as a public school teacher's aide for children with autism and other special needs. Pat lived the last 15 years of her life with cancer and its repercussions. However, Pat was more annoyed and irritated by cancer than ever stopped or labeled by the disease. Pat writes letters, emails, and journal entries to her mother, husband, children, and her many relatives and friends, and highlights her daily life on a southern Wisconsin farm, her appreciation of the natural world, and her courage and vivacity to live fully each day. The reader will soon think of Pat as a close friend, and come to know her as wry, honest, caring, and sometimes poetic. To her mom, Pat writes: "I'm outside... enjoyed the golden minutes of the evening, when the sun lights everything. Now is the blue time - would we call it twilight." In an unsent letter to a long lost friend, Pat talks about being a young mother. "Beyond the next meal, laundry load, dishpan, lies my future." In a letter to a close friend, Pat writes: "I mostly mother and hope for the best." Before her first surgery, she writes to her husband, "Remember that I was pretty tolerant of people's faults but spared not that blatant stupidity." And in the same letter, Pat admits: "I fell in love with you, at first recklessly, then - over and over again." Her writings include her quiet thoughts during winter hibernations in a drafty farmhouse, a raw intimate love letter to her husband before her first surgery; her frank yet kind advice to her daughters about employment and empowerment; a description of a winter outing to a nearby bison farm; summer observances of turtles and loons in Upper Peninsula, Michigan; and her lively commentary about her beloved Book Babes group. Pat's story is not as much about the art of dying as it is about the art of living in the present, with messages of humor and hope in how the human spirit remains undaunted.
