I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, but the highlights of my childhood were on the sand dunes of Michigan. My grandfather was co-founder of a camp there that offered me great times and glimpses of Christianity that prepared me for 25 years later when Christ stood at my door and knocked. My senior year in high school my father took a job in Mt. Airy (Mayberry), North Carolina, home of Andy Griffith. I was disappointed to find it like any other town. While I'm sure it had characters, they didn't pop out at me the way they did in 30 minutes of a good sitcom.

After graduation from high school, I attended UNC-Chapel Hill, where I looked forward to the four best years of my life. Last semester ... senior year ... still looking. While disappointing, that gave me room to appreciate the years to come. In retrospect, I would've been sad to find that the four best years of my life were over at 22!

After graduating from Carolina, I taught a year in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a special education teacher, then moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I taught another four years, including 1st grade. I went there with my new husband while he pursued further education/training and remained there until our two sons were high school and college age. I became a Christian during this time and held some interesting jobs, for which I'm very grateful since my sole criteria for taking a job was that God would provide one where I could leave home in the morning when the school bus did and return before it arrived in the afternoon. This produced eight years of after-school milk and cookies for two wonderful boys while I was office manager for The Virginia Fellowship of Christian Athletes - which in turn provided opportunities to take them with me to coaches camps in the summer (the best: Lake George, New York). Other jobs included The Center for Christian Study in Charlottesville, a guide at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, assistant for a clinical psychologist, a real estate office manager in Chapel Hill, the housing office at Duke University, and housemother at the same sorority in Chapel Hill where I had lived 30 years before. He saved the best for last - The Church of the Good Shepherd.

I am presently working on a Monopoly board done in cross-stitch for my younger son, Jonathan, who loved the game when he was little and a cityscape of Chicago, where my older son Jason lives. Something that would have no reason to surface is that I sang in a barbershop quartet in Durham for years. I especially enjoyed going around to retirement homes. "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" - a real barnburner.