It’s fall. At least it feels that way. All of a sudden, the bright, dry blaze of summer collapsed into crisp mornings and cool evenings. Is there such a thing as Fall Cleaning? For the first time in my twenty-five years of living here, I have been in a re-organizational flurry, clearing out anything I’m not using, keeping only what I need and/or truly love.

Two things triggered this unprecedented energy for simplification: Hopie’s death on August 25, and the Rocky, Valley, Clayton, and other recent miscellaneous Lake County fires. Both death and fire make you think about what’s really important in your life, and I decided that’s all I want to keep. Everything else needs to be where it can be a blessing for someone else.

In that context, I want to bless you with the PDF of my newest book which contains years of never-before-seen poems. Nobody saw them because some were rants as I struggled through deaths and other fires of loss. There are Hedy poems, too, and some are funny because guide dogs are funny, at least Hedy is, in her own inimitable way.

I want to assure you it is not a dismal bunch, because I rewrote the emotional spew and found insight and meaning and goodness where I had seen only insurmountable obstacles and impossibilities. As I wrote in the introduction to the book, “I call this book “Seeing Stars” because not everything is loss, even as we grow older. Sometimes we get something back. Sometimes we see something in a new way, and it’s brighter and more cherished than when we had everything in abundance and the future was still a long way off.”

Click on the cover to read Seeing Stars.