Newly adoptive parents celebrate their child as they welcome the new millennium. A traveling circus performer past his prime stirs the heart of a local woman. A daughter regrets lost opportunities with her late father during his final year in a nursing home. A nineteenth century portrait of a mother and her dead child captures the horror of a deadly disease. In A Part of Me, these reflections and many others are shared with the reader. Collectively, these poems reveal a Western North Carolina woman's upbrining and the moments that have compelled her to examine a life in its complexity of joy and heartache.