Asho I. Craine

This collection of Asho Craines writings is organized into three sections titled Ashos Story, Family and Friends, and Poetry. Following her husbands death in 1993, Asho Craine joined the Learning in Retirement Collective in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and began writing about her childhood and youth. The first part of this collection tells about her family background, her experiences growing up in Brooklyn, New York, the challenges she faced in school, her experience as a member of the first class of students at Bennington College, and her first romance. The chronological account of her life ends with a description of her first job after college. Rather than continue chronologically, Asho then embarked on a series of Memory Letters to her late husband, Lyle Craine. These letters weave recollections of the fifty years they spent together with updates on her life and the lives of her children in the late 1990s. They include her account of Lyles stroke in 1988 and the four and one half years he spent in a nursing home. The appendix to the first section contains three short autobiographical summaries of her life. The second section of the book contains character sketches of members of Ashos family and close friends, written for various occasions. Following her move to Connecticut in 2004, Asho turned to writing poetry. The third section of this book contains her poems written between 2004 and 2009.