Marilyn Fais is a retired elementary school teacher who wove her delight in both words and the natural world into the lives of her students and through her own life, as well. Even while mothering three daughters, building a family cabin on reclaimed, lumbered land in Pennsylvania, and taking summer camping trips, including one by canoe (built by her husband of 60 years) down the Missouri River, she always wrote poetry. Marilyn has had poems published in a number of different magazines, but her family most treasures the yearly birthday and valentine poems she continues to write even now, into her nineties.