Kage Baker was a very polite lady. She always said thank you. We were taught very old-fashioned manners when we were small, and among them was that a thank you was always called for.

One of the rules of Southern Womanhood (which took a lot more on Kage, as the eldest) was that a true lady could make “Thank you so much!” rhyme spiritually with “%*&$^! you, dear” – or something  like that. But what a lady said out loud was “Thank you.” And she smiled. If she  really meant the thank you, the smile was designed to dazzle.

Please, Dear Readers, imagine yourselves now bathed in a dazzling smile from Kage, and most sincerely thanked by me. If you never saw Kage smile (a distinct possibility) you should imagine that her normally black eyes have brightened to a dark hazel green, her freckles are all squinched up on her cheekbones, and that she has dimples.  Or you can look at this:

The comments on yestreday’s post made me cry and think deeply. The nifty little gadgets on the business side of this site show that yestreday’s post got the most hits ever. This  effort of mine doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but the flow yesterday was bigger than usual.

So: thank you for listening. Thank you for understanding what I said. Thank you for caring that I said it at all. Thank you for telling other people about it – because you must have. And thank you for being the sort of people who vote, too. While the elections were a pretty mixed bag, California is a more fortunate place today than many in the country – and only people who get out and vote can accomplish that.

I am proud to know you all.

And now I’m gonna go do laundry. Because I am not a real lady, so I can say stuff like that to my friends.

Tomorrow: the meaning of birds