This young pastor, who teasingly called Ruth Grandmother, fed her soul and gave her hope that culture, beauty, and real FAITH were stronger than death. He honored her worth with conversation and songs and poetry. She responded in kind across generational lines that evaporated into thin air by the warmth of their deep and abiding love and respect.

I have birthed five babies and adopted two. We lived in a quirky, two-family flat converted into a house. I lost whole years of sleep, felt quite brain dead at times, and was convinced that I would never again read anything beyond endless loops of Peter Rabbit for the rest of my life. My coffee was cold. Poetry simply did not exist. Paris was only a dream within a dream. I listened to the nay-sayers and felt I had no other choice. I bid farewell to creativity and released it to more worthy souls than I. I assumed it flew. But it merely went dormant.