Family

The meaning of what is family differs for each of us. Most of us know both love and rejection. The experiences of and interactions between family members may vary dramatically both between individuals and over time. My poems reflect my memories, my experiences, and the stories repeated when I asked questions about my forebears and kin. No one within is up on a pedestal; no one is above reproach. Good folks do bad things, and bad folks may still love. People justify acts that seem baffling to others. This collection began as simply poems related to the theme of family gathered from my previous books. Then, I began adding photos of the people within the poems and it developed, to some extent, into a family scrapbook. A nod to my interest in family lore and genealogy, and making this my most intimate book. Nevertheless, with most of the people within dead, these are, as they must be, my stories, my poems. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein's character Jubal asks Anne the color of a house he points toward. "It's white on this side, boss," she replies. Like that house, every story has many sides yet we only see the side which is presented to us. This is family as I recall it.