Simple Glimpses

About the Book

Readers will find much of the natural world in Simple Glimpses, which I believe to be the best, and the most easily allowed looks we can attain. There is also much of me in this little volume. Writing from the soul is tantamount to giving birth; often painful, always messy and the child produced sometimes difficult to share. My hope is to find an audience who is willing to do just that.

My husband and I are latter day homesteaders, living in a house built with our own hands. It is a home in a quiet maple wood; the sighing pines our lullaby, the chatter of birdsong our symphony.

We have two grown children, four grandchildren and a yellow Labrador retriever who is my boon companion. In addition to my own writings, which are many and varied, I author a weekly column in our local newspaper.

About the Author

I cannot recall a time when I wasn’t a reader, or a writer. I had a little pink diary with a tiny gold key, a fingernail would do in a pinch, to open it. I soon graduated to notebooks, before journaling was a recognized pastime or therapeutic device. For me it was simply looking at my world and penning my perceptions of it on a napkin or the back of an envelope if necessary.

I was born and raised in a small northern Wisconsin town. My upbringing was middle class country. My parents were neither rich nor poor. It was a Mayberry, NC childhood without the southern accent. My dad was a logger. My mom a housewife when the words politically correct didn’t exist and no one had ever been termed a domestic engineer. A sickly child, my mother set tasks to keep me quietly occupied. In turn they expanded my vocabulary, as well as my mind, as only copying a page from the encyclopedia, the dictionary or the family Bible will do. She read to my siblings and I each day. My favorite childhood story was “The Little Red Hen”, my favorite books a set of Childcraft Encyclopedias, chock full of fun and funny stories and poems. I own them still. Those volumes were a definite influence on my later writings.

I will read nearly anything, but poetry is my first love. There is something about the rhyme and meter, or lack thereof, which can soothe or excite. Nature is my favorite subject; ever changing, yet always there. The green grass of summer may not last, yet neither will the winter snows. I’ve always been close to nature; a child, now a woman of the outdoors and its many pursuits.