Friends & Family While Beauty and Love drive us, it is friends and family that provide our foundation and shape our perspective, much of our growth is realized in the give and take within these relationships. Love relationships (as powerful and life changing as they are) come and go, burn hot and cold, and can lead us to states of either ecstasy or madness. It is family relationships and friendships which consume the greater part of our lives, provide the backdrop of Birthdays, Holidays, other notable events, and create many of our lives most defining moments and memories. It has been said that we don’t know what we have, until it’s gone, that statement often speaks to family. Our immediate family is certainly our cornerstone, but our extended family is multi-generational and includes all of our relatives, and those who are a part of their lives. Together, immediate, and extended family casts a wide net and includes the greatest and the least, the born and the dying, the quietest, almost invisible ones, and most gregarious amongst us all. Friends weave a different sort of cloth, a fabric with its own unique texture. You can’t choose your family (as the old saying goes), but you can choose your friends. Another old saying states They know you by the company you keep this - speaks directly to our friendships. I have always found it interesting that High School graduates, writing in yearbooks, say that we are best friends forever or nothing will ever divide us and within a single year all contact is lost, often forever. Life has many moments and events that are similar to this. Life, is a journey, and it is our friends and family that are there to share it with us. Some poets observe and report on this journey and the many paths it takes, and attempt to capture, at least in some small part, what it means - to all of us! This book is a collection of poems that attempt such observations.