Final Project

PREFACE

I promised my mother before she died that I would continue to write. Perhaps a book, I thought, or more likely, scattered rants and uninteresting rhymes scribbled on sticky notes and napkins that float away easily with a stiff wind. I guess she wanted me to promise because she knew what peace it brought to me. Self-therapy, I guess. I remember making that same promise to myself years earlier on Black Hawk Mountain after deciding not to jump. The wind was stiff there as well. In the small harbor village of Boscastle, England, there is, what tourist brochures describe as, a conservation area amongst some of the most beautiful countryside within the British Isles. I made the promise there while sitting on a jagged rock, which I boldly claimed as my own, and licking the droplets of mists from the ocean air off my lips. The sun was dipping her body below the horizon and the shadows stopped dancing. I thought of it as enchanting as well as a catalyst for change. It started to rain. The promise was again made in cell 34 of Blue Earth County Jail some years later. This time I wrote the promise down, as if I needed the reminder. I used a dull pencil so as not to stab myself or anyone else. There was no wind.

My story, my life, is written for myself. Each one of us has a story, and you, the reader, are no different….