What's Left

This memoir, in the author's autobiographical short stories and essays, illustrated by her poetry and photographs, spans her first twenty-three years of life in mid-twentieth-century Kansas and the following five decades traveling throughout Europe and living in Northern California. The book is a tribute to the "ordinary", "little" lives that leave no trace behind other than a fleeting bit of immortality in the memory of those who outlive them; only to fade finally when the rememberers die. It is also an attempt to honor and finally come to accept the transient, illusive, quicksilver nature of all existence by describing what does not last as, in a paradoxical way, eternal . . . in the conclusion of What's Left ". . . rising out of ruin, the soul of each lost without, lilacs still growing, summer rains still falling, all the holy things", yet simultaneously accepting the final words of the poem, Alexandrias: "None of this matters, in the end we all will be, lost libraries burned". All ends in mystery . . .