Audrey Rooney, three times a Kentucky resident, now living in Lexington, recalls a life filled with words. Her mother was a published poet active in Cleveland, where Audrey was born in 1938. An October baby, she heard "October's Bright Blue Weather" every birthday and learned her alphabet sitting on the living room floor perplexed by gold letters on Britannica spines: RAYN to SAAR, SARS to SORC. Her dad promised her a dollar for memorizing them all and she did. As a journalist she has published in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky. She is a trained soprano and her watercolors and drawings hang in collections in this country and abroad. Undergraduate philosophy studies, two post-graduate forays, (MA in art history, doctorate in history), a long marriage, a daughter and a son, their daughter and sons, clusters of wondrous friends—all tinctured with loss and discovery—prompt this first book of poems gathered in memory of James R. Rooney.
