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Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and I are friends. We met, as I've noted here before, over the essays we wrote about mothering—our work ultimately appearing in Salon.com and in the two wildly successful anthologies that Kate edited with Camille Peri, Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So. We continue to meet, from time to time, in San Francisco, in New York City, or here outside Philadelphia. When we can't meet, we email and call. We read the other's books long before most people do. We rely on one another.

This year, both Kate and Reiko have new books due out; they have both also launched new blogs. Kate's Cake Walk, a recipe-infused memoir about surviving childhood, is due out from Dial Press in May. The book, so irresistibly Kate, is excerpted here.

Reiko's memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, is due out from Feminist Press in September. It's a book about motherhood and Ground Zero, a book infused with freighted questions about what it means to survive and to love. Reiko is a mother, a teacher, a reader, and, of course, a writer, and in her new blog, you get to see all sides of her.

The photos above, finally, are this: Kate's cats, looking out through her kitchen window, while she made dinner for us this past August; and my husband, my son, Reiko's family, and Reiko during our trip to Hawk Mountain, a few years ago.

All through the night, there's been rain and howling wind, and now, in the dark, I gather my things for a day trip to Wall Street.

I remember a day, years ago, when Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Camille Peri, and I were all headed uptown to give a reading from the Salon.com anthology, Mothers Who Think. Rain had overtaken Manhattan, and every subway stop was flooded through, and from stop to stop we ran, Reiko the transplanted New Yorker leading the way. We were to meet Jayne Anne Phillips and others at a bookstore. We were not to be late. We put our trust entirely in this gorgeous green-eyed, dark-haired physicist-athlete-writer, and she did not let us down.

I'd never met Reiko before that day. She became and now remains one of my very best friends. Whenever I go to New York City, I think first of her, and how it was that she got us safely through.