She was already a famous journalist in agricultural circles when I met her, in the early 1980s. I was learning how to lobby at the hand of Maureen Hinkle of National Audubon, writing policy stuff for Sierra Club, and free-lancing as a consultant and writer, mostly trying to stitch some conservation into the farm subsidy system. No one knew me, but everyone knew her. She was Sonja Hillgren, UPI.

The eyes were big, dark, serious, an intellectual’s; pity the source they fixed upon who played the fool, like the budget-cutting boobs in the Reagan administration who tried to pass ketchup off as a vegetable in the school lunch program. But the smile transformed her when it flashed, which was often, and I was always a bit startled to see her beauty take over. Though she was a journalist through and through, she never looked the part. Always faultlessly coiffed and dressed to kill, Sonja looked as if she’d stepped out of the pages of Town and Country, not a scrum of reporters circling a committee chairman or ag secretary. Of course, by the time most of those scrums had formed Sonja had long since filed the story--and with better sources.

Sonja was one of the first mainstream journalists to understand the potential of conservationists as players in farm policy as the 1985 Farm Bill was taking shape. Hell, she understood it before we did. Her stature in farm policy circles was such that we gained credibility simply because she wrote about us and our ideas. An interview with Sonja set friendship aside, a ground rule she conveyed with an arch of her eyebrow and enforced with tough, probing questions. It was all business. You emerged with your facts in better order or in need of quick reinforcements; your policy proposals sharpened or in tatters; and with a high-altitude perspective on where it all fit within the realpolitik of farm policy.

Sonja left UPI for a stint at Knight Ridder before joining Farm Journal in 1990, and she became its editor and moved to Philly in 1995. Her DC friends saw less of her thereafter, of course, so every chance to grab lunch or dinner was an occasion. About that time she was elected president of the National Press Club, and I remember how proud I felt whenever I saw her commandeer the podium at a Press Club lunch, poised, confident, at the very top of her profession.

I spoke with her for the last time in October, minutes after the shock of her email about the brain tumor. She'd had surgery by then and was about to undergo further treatment, but she was feeling good that day, and sounded hopeful and determined. But the lede in our conversation was a wonderful man named Bruce Downs, to whom she had been engaged when the cancer was discovered. They married while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery--he'd insisted on it. I hope to meet him some day.

We had the chance to share our feelings for one another on that call, as I know she did with so many of her friends these past few months. I promised to check in, but when I did, in late November, Sonja didn't respond. Unusual for her. I found myself thinking about her a lot this past Tuesday. As I found out from Chuck Abbott the next morning, Sonja had died in her sleep that very night.

I'm on the wrong coast to attend the service, which is underway as I write. So I'm starting my blog on farm policy instead, with this entry. Sonja would have written it better and faster.

She had potent laugh impossible not to conspire with. It started when that smile of hers burst wide open, then it grabbed hold, rocking her in waves of joyful, hyperventilative gasps. When something struck her as particularly funny, you sometimes couldn't hear Sonja laugh at all.