Childhood memories are like pages dog eared, only part of the story.  Warm strawberries picked fresh from the vine, sweet on your tongue.  Summer waters singing low across algae’d river bottoms.  Howling coyotes, distant through the trees at sunset.  Picturesque as these snapshots may be, they are incomplete stories. Childhood is full of golden hour drenched images juxtaposed with things less easy to understand.  Messy, chaotic, unnatural, human things. Weaknesses. Backbeats. Violence. Regrets. Lack. Loss, and sorrow. It is amongst all of these things where my world was birthed. Among the valleys of nature clashing with the mountains of man. Here is where I would learn and unlearn what it means to be human. All powerful and full of vulnerability. Part of and separate from everything. Fires burning, torrential downpours drenching our duality manifest.  Ask me why I write? Why I tell stories? What good is all the trouble? To write is to try as best one might, through meticulous observation, to remember the truths known and forgotten. Seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, grasping for the knowledge swept away with a wave of man’s hand and a whisper on the autumn breeze.