Winter's Light

As natural as the tree, St. Francis appeared. Golden light surrounded us. When I was four, St. Francis visited me as I walked back from the creek. Grandma had drawn my bath water and I remember how it slopped in the pail as we walked through the trees. Looking up, I saw St. Francis. This is my first memory of Wyoming.

My Uncle Jim had committed suicide. My mother had sent me to Wyoming for the summer to help my grandmother mourn. As her remedy, I gave her a focus and it worked. East of Yellowstone, we lived in a one room cabin, just the two of us. We spent all summer, hauling water and collecting firewood. At bedtime, I d insist on changing clothes behind a screen, but when it came to bath time and being outside in the mountain air, I d easily throw off my clothes.

During the mid 60 s, a cultural revolution was happening and we were far from it. This is where I mark my life journey into darkness, and this book of poems is where I mark how I found my way home.

I grew up with stories that dealt with the heart: how people live, how they deal with their pain and how they managed to live with loss. My grandmother told them, sometimes to me, but mainly I overheard them. Being a sheriff s wife, she was a news center. I see now how these painful stories helped her deal with her son s suicide, and how I became fascinated with the choices people made around the experience of death. As a child, my family didn t talk much about my Uncle s suicide, until his children started asking. This discussion of his death started shortly before I hit puberty. It seemed an easier topic than the shooting accident that happened in 4th grade, when my father s gun went off while he was cleaning it and shot my older sister in the leg. In an odd way, it drew us children together and tore us incessantly apart. These two shooting events shaped me in ways I couldn t understand until this book had been completed. The maturation process gave me distance, from myself, from Wyoming, and from my family.

Though the struggle came with writing, once I stepped out of it for several years, I reinvisioned the poems. I could see, I was predestined to see the world through a window of light. I see this as the message of St. Francis. All the horror I perceived, provided me with the development of compassion and these poems gave me beauty. The three sections are a journey. The first relays the life around the larger than life greatness and perception of being a Kinkade, especially around grandfather as the town Sheriff. The second provides a collection of heard stories, some real and some imagined. The last set of poems shot through me, they took me deeper into my Self so that I could grow beyond that which I saw around me. In a sense, this entire collection is my dark vision of a Wyoming world that no longer exists. The poems resonate and envision a life from torn pieces of history and imagined realties. They exist on the page for the reader s journey, and perhaps, for a sense of freedom.