A Love Affair With Flowers Fair is a book of 365 poems, mostly sonnets, culled from over 500 poems, and organized by assigning each to an appropriate day of the year. Organized in monthly groups, readers will recognize natural themes -- such as wildflowers, the seasons, plants, and birds -- within the month appropriate to their inspiration and genesis. The forest and shores of Lake Michigan, and Bass Lake, north of Pentwater, Michigan, together with the nine mile path along Lake Michigan between Hyde Park and Chicago's downtown, are the locales. The words of one early reader who expressed great joy, and thanks for the common vision he shared with the writer, were as follows; "You have articulated in poetic forms so many of the impressions and experiences that suggest themselves when I am busy in my conifertum on the shore of Lake Michigan in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin." Another woman wrote the author several times, over the course of as many years, to express her thanks. Although not written with any theraputic intent, she had, nonetheless, incorporated the poems into her daily meditations toward that end and used terms like wonderful, most delightful, helpful, possessing a beauty of their own, enjoyable, particularly meaningful, and capable of providing increasing depth of meaning when read frequently. These written responses and other verbal encouragements prompted the release of the poems as originally provided to early readers. Ms. Elizabeth Bidwell Goetz copyedited the text.
About the Author: Earl Ronneberg, author of the trilogy, Old Friends and Other Stories, Stories of Identity, and Stories of Groups, grew up in Chicago and attended Princeton on a NROTC regular scholarship before serving three years of active duty on the Destroyer, USS Hank (DD-702). After the Navy, he earned a Masters Degree from Stanford, married, and moved to Hyde Park in Chicago where he completed an MBA from the University of Chicago while employed by IBM. He also completed the University of Chicago's four year great books program. After over thirty-one years with IBM, he retired and completed a MLA (Master in Liberal Arts) degree from the University of Chicago. His most recent work is: Work -- A Memoir, a non fiction book that chronicles a span of thirty-four years of work spaning the period of May 1964 through June 30th of 1997.