The cover of my book, Dissolve and other poems, holds much meaning for me. It is a photo of the creek, East Weaver Creek, that ran right next to the house where I grew up. That creek lulled me to sleep for so many nights of my life, and there is nothing like a creek to lull a person to sleep. The sound of a creek is nature's lullaby. When my brother and I were really young, we played down in the creek fairly incessantly in the summer. We gathered creek stones and built little "frog resorts" and then caught frogs and set them loose in the resorts. We also caught polywogs and minnows in coffee cans, looked at them for a while, then poured them back into the creek. One time we gathered red and yellow clay from the creek banks, mixed it with water, then "painted" (using our fingers) our faces with "war paint." It is this type of childhood activity that seems increasingly rare these days, and I feel so fortunate to have had that kind of fun. We would spend a whole afternoon wandering up and down the creek, picking and eating blackberries, having neither a care in the world nor a fear of anything. The particular area of the creek that's in this photo is several miles upstream from where I lived, a short distance above East Weaver Campground. I used to ride my horse, a bay mare named Sassy, through this area, and I once attended a week-long girl scout summer camp that was held close to where the photo was taken. The water in East Weaver Creek comes from East Weaver Lake and its surrounding watershed, a place I have hiked in to many times. East Weaver Lake is but a short hike from the road that leads up to the Weaver Bally lookout--one of the easier Trinity Alps lakes to access. The particular day I took the photo gives another layer of meaning to my book's cover. It was an early evening in June 2011, and the reason I was in the East Weaver woods that day was because my sister, brother, and I had met in Weaverville so we could take our mother's ashes out to the forest and give her back to the earth. Summer storms had been passing through, so the semi-cloudy skies were tinging everything with the most beautiful light, and it was that special light coming through the leaves of creek-side trees that my lens captured as we walked in search of the right place. There is a poem in the book that reflects upon that time.