Loose Hinges: "I am the kid who nailed the hinges on the hen house door."
During the summer of 1958, Carl Tinker, a transient, arrived on my grandfather's farm. He asked to paint the barn.
At the time, I was a child who liked to spend time with my grandparents and sit at their round oak table with my cup of orange nectar, while they drank coffee and sipped sugar from a teaspoon.
Sometimes the old black and white photographs were brought out, the radio turned on, and stories told about my family's past. For a summer, Carl joined in.
Carl had a way of speaking poetry and rhyme in conversation. He had a way of twisting words into what I now recognize as a bit of satire, and he did it with a grin, even as he wielded a paint brush over the out buildings.
For a season, I wanted to write like he spoke, and this is it, Loose Hinges. A folk art and poetry blend, if there is such a thing.
And as Carl did, I liked to say hello and good bye to places.
My husband Jay and I said hello to Montana three times. But before that, there was Washington state where our children grew up, and then, it was back home to Minnesota, and to our roots after a thirty year absence. So I write here of leaving and returning. 1967 - 1997. Or there abouts.
"There is properly no history - only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Acts 17:28 (KJ Bible) "For in Him we live, and move and have our being: as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."
Most of Loose Hinges was written before I turned fifty, around the end of the 20th century.
