Mom, you and I have been unable, for over a year, to share any time together. Believe me, it hasn't been the same without your sparkling eyes, encouraging words, and endless smile. Being so far from home, and all alone at that, has been one of the most painful sacrifices I've had to make for the sake of this trek.

Luckily, though, my days have been blessed with the compassion of so many other mothers, who somehow have found yet more love in their overworked hearts for one more gangly kid with a big stomach and a sore body and spirit. Of course it''s not the same as you, Mom, but still I don't think I'd have made it this far around the world without all the fussing and care of my "moms away from Mom."

I don't know why I've been blessed with so much love and warmth every time the worldwalk has reached its roughest stages. Maybe I'm just luckier than I give myself credit for, or maybe the world's mothers have seen something in me of their own children who've since grown into adults and parted to other regions to live.

I've become certain of one thing, though, as a result of all the kindnes shown me by my new moms: Without mothers, and their seemingly depthless reservoirs of love, this world would be much less beautiful.

How can I ever forget, or even begin to thank, all the moms of the worldwalk? Moms llike Ella, the very first, who treated me to a huge home-cooked steak dinner, even though she'd been laid off from her Cincinnati auto assembly job for over a year and was nearly broke. Or Linda, who had had to heat my bath water in a big pail on the wood-burning stove in her Appalachian cabin. Or Estaline who, with her bright blue eyes and tiny elderly frame, made me sit down on the porch of her Virginia cottage and eat breakfast, because she had thought I might be an angel sent by God to test her charitableness. She wasn't about to let me pass and thus cause her to lose her chance at going to Heaven!

Or what of Jodie, who didn't think her elegant large Washington, D.C., home was too fancy for my hobo-like figure to stay a week? Or Caitlin, with her fiery Irish temper and always-crowded pub on the banks of the River Boyne? Or 78-year-old Connie and her gut-busting Northern Ireland soda bread and potato cakes? Or Therese and Danielle, two mothers of huge French Catholic farm families who found room for one more hungry lad in their tiny poor homes? Or Rina and her Kansas-style hospitality and Bible lectures deep in a hostile Morocco? Or Fatima, who insisted on feeding me the Algerian specialty of couscous, even though it meant she had to squat on a dirt floor for hours to grind by hand the wheat grains?

So many loving moms on this big planet...so many along my "solitary" path.

Perhaps the best way I can think to tell them--as well as you, Mom--how much all of you have meant to me in the first one-third of the worldwalk is to say those three simple words I suspect you never hear enough: I love you.

Thanks, Moms. May each of you have a very special Mother's Day.

Steven