I'd like to dedicate this page to my mother. It has taken me years to really realize just how special she really was. The following is about my life with her. Our love and sometimes hate we felt for each other, our differences of opinions, and our life together in general.

Just in case you're wondering about the flowers on these pages, they're dogwoods. My mother was highly allergic to any type of flower, and they were not permitted in our house. Although deep down in her heart she probably loved flowers as much as anyone else, she never had anything good to say about them, at least not to me. But every spring, I would see my mother go to the windows and look out into the field and woods in our back yard, looking to see if the dogwoods had bloomed yet. I think that's the only flower I ever heard her say that she truly loved, and she watched and waited for them every year.
After she left us, we designed the tombstone to go on her grave. On the back side, I drew a dogwood tree for her. On the front side, on the very bottom, I had them etch the words, "Earth Has No Pain That Heaven Cannot Heal". This is my legacy to her.

I was the third child in our family. I had an older brother, who is 10 years older than I am, and a sister who is 7 years older than me. I was actually what a lot of people would call a "mistake", but my mother always called me her "miracle" child.
By the time I was starting school, my brother was a junior in high school, and my sister was in the 8th grade. Before I was even in junior high school, both my sister and brother had married and moved out. Even before they moved out, I was too young to have much to do with them. Especially since by that time they were teenagers, doing teenager things.

We lived in a very rural community that probably consisted of 300 people at the most, dogs and cats included. There were very few children around that were my age. I look back now and I see myself as almost a loner. I say "almost" because I did have friends, but I was just as content to be by myself. I can remember coming home from school, throwing my books down, kicking off my shoes and heading back outside, most of the time, going out and playing in the surrounding woods.

I loved the solitude, although I never felt I was truly alone. I don't even remember ever feeling lonely. My friends were all of the birds and squirrels and other small animals around me. One incident that stands out in my mind more than any other rememberances of my childhood, was of a little squirrel that allowed me to be his (or her) friend. I had one special place that I usually would go to, where, at one time years before I was born, an old house had stood. The only thing remaining there, the only way that you could tell that anything at all had ever been there besides the grass and trees, was the beautiful buttercups growing there. They were all placed in perfect little circles, and sometimes in straight rows across a small clearing. It was obvious that someone had taken special care and had put a lot of thought into where they should be. Even though there wasn't even a piece of lumber, a brick or anything at all left of the house that once stood there, and obviously hadn't been in decades, the buttercups, or daffodills remained in their places, not spreading out of their boundries, as these flowers usually do when they're left to grow wild. To me they seemed like little guardians or sentrys standing at attention, guarding the old homesite.

In the middle of these flowers, there was a big log, an old tree that probably stood in the front yard of the old house. This was my most favorite spot in the world. The tree looked to me like it had fallen right where the house had once stood. I used to sit on that log and imagine that I was sitting on a couch or a chair in the living room or "front parlor" of the house. A lot of times, I even fell asleep on that log, or against it, just trying to imagine myself inside the house, wondering who once lived there and what their lives were like. I had a variety of stories as to what events could have gone on in that house. I knew that it wasn't very big, so I never imagined any grand stories of Cinderella type. Most of the stories that I made up were of an old couple, their children long since moved away, living there alone, content with only the company of each other.

Kathy, Thank you so much for letting me borrow your dogwood, you don't know what it means to me!