After photographing in the small towns in Ohio, I had a glimmering insight.  I realized that my attraction to photographing people whose lives were fairly compromised and on the “edge” was linked to a significant memory from my childhood. Around 1949, my father drove my sister and me down to stay with relatives, who were living in the Ozarks in Arkansas.  My Ozark relatives lived on a small, dirt farm, which has vividly stayed with me, due to the snapshots my father took of me and my sister with our Arkansas family.  In 1987, I returned to photograph in the Ozarks and to visit with a great aunt who still lived in the Boston Mountains. Instead of photographing her and her family, I wandered out to small towns nearby to photograph complete strangers, families with whom I oddly felt connected.