Eight years now I’ve been retired. For thirty years, while working, stories from my youth haunted me—everybody who’s been to war has stories, I’ve listened to thousands from the old men who fought in the Good War—and I came to realize that I had to tell mine before I joined those old men. Dawn walks across dew-covered meadows watching days awaken—seasons change, blending with treelines, silently, as deer and geese, squirrels and spiders accepted my presence—awakened urgency to tell those stories.
I began taking writing classes at our local university. As semesters passed, essays accumulated. About the third year, I discovered poetry and a new world—a world of condensed images, actions, senses—a world that explores the moment. Walking my meadows, sitting silently in the treeline notebook in hand, images and long-buried memories pour onto the page. Universal symbols of changing seasons, storms, drought, nature’s design (or lack of it) in watching the food chain at work—deer/wolves, foxes/rabbits, owls/mice, swallows/flies, spiders/moths, and crows and ravens; always the raucous caws of those scavengers—open doors for me.