The most frustrating thing I have had to face about life is that just when it seems things are comfortable, something or somebody tosses a cow patty in the middle of everything.   Webster’s defines what normal means but that doesn’t hold true when things happen that change your life in ways that seem impossible to handle or to even find anything that resembles “normal”.   At the age of six, my journey of going through life changes started.  The one constant fact that remains constant is that I will find a way to get through and move on with living my life.  My Father, who was a Marine and fought in WWII set a great example of  what it meant to improvise, adapt and overcome.  Life changing events happen. The the old way of life, the comfortable feeling of how it’s always been ceases to exist.   In order to cope with those changes, we have to figure out ways to make the adjustments to a new way of doing things.

The person writing to you now is greatly changed from the little girl in the mountains who believed that people were good. Back then when I minded my manners and did my chores, I got rewarded with a treat to Dairy Queen.  Nobody knows how much I loved going to that ice cream castle in West Asheville, NC.   There was safety in the way life was lived back then.  We did leave doors unlocked when we went to bed.