Some 700 walkers converged upon Worcester Technical High School on a warm Saturday morning in late April to raise awareness and money for multiple sclerosis research.

At Walk MS: Worcester, I had the privilege of hosting the event — using a finicky, hand-held mic which didn’t like the wind — where I was honored to spotlight a local woman’s story about her diagnosis of MS in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tanisha Stevens, her husband, her two young daughters, her sister, and her best friend took to the stage as we celebrated her strength, her perseverance, and her loving circles of support. Circles were the big theme this year, hence pictures of people holding circles on plastic sticks: Orange for those with MS, green for those who love someone with MS, and yellow for those who work to support the cause.

Participants — some of whom dressed in very colorful, creative attire including orange tutus — said they felt a sense of camaraderie and really liked the message that no one is in this alone.

A week later, under mildly threatening skies, I hosted the Walk MS: Longmeadow event at Longmeadow High School in western Massachusetts. As someone who grew up in The 4-1-3 (the area code), I was so pleased to run into people who not only knew colleagues of mine, but also folks who knew my mom, Judy O’Brien, when she was the manager of two stores in Northampton, Mass. and appeared in regular “Wine Mother” segments on a local radio station.

I even met the effervescent, take-no-BS Judy Potter (second down on the right in the collage above) who pulled from her purse the op/ed I wrote which she’d ripped out of the paper that morning. After reading the piece — where I compared Taylor Swift’s “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” to pretending all is well when you have MS — she said she, someone who’s had MS for decades, had to meet me. Turns out, Judy’s friends with the first editor I worked with at The Republican, Cynthia Simison, who later went on to run the whole operation, becoming the paper’s first woman to hold the post.

While the Longmeadow crowd was smaller than Worcester’s, it felt supportive and enthusiastic nonetheless, something I experienced acutely when an adorable, beefy bulldog practically knocked me over with excitement as I pet him just a few feet beyond the finish line.