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Excerpt from Mom Memories:
The earth takes back all its creation, the mother gathers up all and recycles everything, nothing goes to waste.  But this landscape feels strange and distant.  We grew up with her and now she is a stranger.  Our love for her is all twisted.  All of us are equal in our atoms and matter, different forms but all the same organism.  To lose one is to lose a part of the whole.  We can’t see the forest for the trees.  We can’t see the house anymore.

 
The earth is central in my picture I have of my mom,  and the land that called her back also let her down. It feels like somehow we the people have been displaced from our own homeland.  The struggle to work the land has given way to some other type of struggle, a more sinister tinge has colored the countryside I once was so  enchanted by.  The central Missouri town she lived in and returned to after her divorce feels comatose, and the one she grew up in and I loved is dead.   There’s no connection to the earth anymore because greed has taken all the family farms down. No one can make a living out there. It feels foreign to me now. Meth labs pock the earth, spreading like a cancer which requires self-destruction. Racism still abounds there with the good country folk.  People still die from diabetes.  It is no longer the good earth.