Last night, I remembered how it felt to be carried by the sound of a word. I was lifted by vowels, jolted by consonants and wooed by a poet's breath. I attended a reading by Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and it moved me. I didn't realize how much it moved me until this morning, when I woke up with words buzzing and sounds swarming inside my head.

I have not always wanted to be a writer. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballerina, a teacher, a doctor, a fashion designer, an interior designer and a candy shop owner. I didn't devour books like many writers I know, and I don't even have a childhood favorite.

But sometime between then and now, I fell in love with the written word. That love spun me into a whirlwind adventure of sentence diagrams and teen magazines and journalism school and personal web sites and pretzel alphabets and Boggle.

I still do not read nearly as much as I wish I did, and I am not yet ready to write my Great American Novel, but I will always have a spot in my heart for words. The homepage of my first web site read: "When you use words every day it's hard to make them count, but I try." And I do. I try.