I have started to add a section of author's notes about the poems to "Returning: A Short Book." They are my thoughts about the poems as I was writing them.
It is now just past four years since my wife died of metastatic lung cancer. I have recently purchased a film/slide scanner for digitizing slides and photos and storing them on a computer. My hope is to copy these photos onto DVD disks and give each of my children a copy. Many of the pictures are of my wife and family as we celebrated birthdays and holidays and as we traveled across the US and camped in national parks and forests. We had many great experiences together as a family that I never was able to have with my family of origin. We were able to take my mother on one of these camping trips to the American west one summer. It was the first time she had traveled west of the Mississippi river and the first time she had gone camping. I had made sure my children had as much exposure with their grandparents as we could possibly arrange because my experiences with my own grandparents were such a source of richness for me. Watching our three generations together gave me great comfort and pride.