About Sarah: Sarah Kersey is a poet and educator in Spokane, WA. She teaches at both Gonzaga University and North Idaho College. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in Poet Lore, Hunger Mountain, Atlanta Review and more.
Why I chose this poem: Kerry wrote "Indiana'' before we met, but upon reading it for the first time, I felt instantly connected to both Kerry and her lasting legacy. Mid-poem she asks, "did I come into / this life a transitory being, / or would this be my final / resting place, wandering / through corn fields, / leaning against that bright / green combine?" I will always carry the ache of missing Kerry with me, but I also carry these lines, her grace towards impermanence, and this image of her: happy, wandering through corn fields, visiting all the homes and communities she built wherever she went.
About Kerry: Kerry Rutherford (1948–2024) was a third-generation Washingtonian. A self-proclaimed “wandering hippie chick” in her youth, she went on to work in a wide range of jobs, from cannery worker to elementary school teacher to grant writer, and lived in a variety of places—Alaska, Indiana, Ohio, Seattle, and, finally, Spokane, the place where she felt she’d found her true home.
She earned three master’s degrees in her 70s—nonfiction, poetry, and history—and had a startling knowledge of astrology. Her ability to make and keep friends across all of the usual boundaries of age, gender, class and religion brought countless strangers together in community. She had one child. She is the author of In Search of Groovy, available at Auntie’s Bookstore.