In a Place, at a Time (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798899905094)

The book begins with the sanctity of place, the ways in which we exerience geography and it experiences us. How it courses through our lives over landscapes both real and metaphorical (Geography Begins). The author's own geographic journey begins and ends in New Mexico with some detours along the way, and includes El Paso TX as baja NM. She hopes to engage all readers, wherever they are from, to think about how geography has impacted their lives. Her ancestors homesteaded in this state. When her immediate family was not living here, but returning to visit relatives, she remembers finagling a way to sit shotgun and put her longish legs up on the dashboard to be the first one in the state. After graduating high school, she said adios to the east coast and went to the University of New Mexico (Gracias Siempre). Three poems center on a marriage during the time of the Vietnam War, a divorce and subsequent death of a spouse. The rest of the collection is focussed on the magic of people and places that have been important in her life, and her current home in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico. Her poems are straightforward and a bit sparse, like the landscape. She makes almost no effort to impress anyone with special knowledge, other than being familiar with or looking up the definition of a few words in Spanish. She writes what she observes, what she feels, what she dreams, what she remembers. The ending poem (Adobe Words) is a prayer that the earth, the adobes we make with mud and water, that we live in, will heal us, all of us, over time with love.