Arms Filled With Bittersweet is just that ... an intimate glimpse, via poetry and prose, into a bittersweet mid-century childhood in rural Connecticut. With gentle humor and simple elegance, the author offers a collection of layered memories and braided reflections, choosing to gaze more deeply into the subtle complexities of the time, mostly of love, its disguises, and the creativity it took to thrive then and later. As she says in her opening Note to Readers: For me, my family has become a long and lyrical poem ... its margins smudged with cryptic notes, its rough drafts fraught with strong punctuation. Everywhere there are bad line breaks and the never-ending cut and paste of endless revisions ... forever meant to be a work in progress.