I have traveled around the sun forty-one times. I am a mom, an Avon Lady, a reluctant writer and poet, a helluva tap-dancer, a human companion to birds and dogs and pot-bellied pigs.

Two and a half years ago I paid ten bucks to peddle Avon door-to-door. I started writing stories the week I started selling cosmetics. I don't know why. When people ask, I tell them I wanted to remember my strange customers, the women who hid Latin lovers in their closet, the ones who paid me in pennies and pumpkin bread. But the truth was something different, something I still can't articulate. My heart pumped heavy blood, swollen red cells that carried the weight of forty years of memory. I had to unload it.

Somehow, in the telling, in the seven hundred days of pen against paper, feet against pavement, I uncovered something I never knew was hidden. I discovered my fingers were meant to type, my mind was meant to race, this body held snapshot bits of pet and lover and brochure for a reason. I don't know where it's going, just know I'm following a trail of crumbs some invisible force left for me to find.

You can always find me at my personal blog, Birdie Jaworski Dot Com.

I also have another profile here at OurStory where I post my Avon Adventures.