For Sotto Poet's Traditional Cinquain Poetry Contest

I chose  theme #3 "The Beauty of Your Loved Ones" because without them, life is not worth living. It's hard to fit them all into five cinquain stanzas, but I sort of did it by categorizing them according to their arrival in my life, with mother first and friends last (although I also had many wonderful friends from my childhood). My father had a mental illness, so he was not really in my life since my mother divorced him when I was very young, but he was a very intelligent and happy person before he got sick and I got to visit him on the west coast far from the state I grew up in a few times throughout my life. I classified him with "kin." One person I was not able to fit into this poem was Dale, a stepbrother who came into my life when I was 8 and who was taken from us all by a drunken driver that hit him when he was barely finishing law school. I have written many poems about Dale (posted her at Soup) because he was, for me, the best example of integrity I ever knew of in a man.