Anne's thoughts

Grandma taught me to love poetry before I learned to hate it and learned to love it again, and she had no idea. I couldn't have been more than 10, and I loved to look through all the books on her bookshelf. One little book, a battered little thing with ugly woodcut drawings for pictures, came to continually fascinate me. It was Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," and I loved the words without understanding them, read them over and over, tried to trace them in my memory. Little did I know how this poem would capture my relationship with God and that I needed to live the words to understand them. Grandma noticed my fascination with the book one day and told me to keep it. I didn't understand the importance of the event until later and she didn't realize the depth of this interchange, either. But that was her. She gave without manipulating the results.