Leaves

It was during the 1940's when author Leona Mason Heitsch wrote to a sick aunt about "a clear, bubbling spring that flowed from the base of an oak shaded knoll in our West Bloomfield, Michigan woodland." Her aunt told her that reading her letter "was like walking in the woods with you." Six decades later, the author is still applying graphite to paper, as she would call it. Her most recent work, Leaves, is a collection of poetry in three parts. The locality, rural Washington County in Missouri, stays the same. Time, however, never does. The poems, like leaves falling in season, swirl about in history, while roots supply the nutrients for new buds--poems which aren't even born yet.