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My Happy Place, by Jane Kruger

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  Born at Edmonton General Hospital to a single mother, which was risqué at the time. However,  the man next door thought she just glowed through the pregnancy and was even more beautiful.  They married when I was 4 months old and gave me 3 step sisters.  We moved to the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia just before I turned 6. It was a small town called Winfield back then. The name has since been changed to Lake Country. I started grade 1 in 1966 and at graduation, a lot of us had been together for the 12 years of schooling!   Off to college but I dropped out to go to work and move away from home,  finally.  Asked my job with a big bank to transfer me to Edmonton and they did as I wished.  Finally,  I feel a lot freer. Now to have some fun! On to the next phase of marriage and 2 daughters.  However,  the marriage didn’t last but we agreed to be great parents and we both did stay amicable and raised two beautiful women. Today,  I have a granddaughter from each of them and I love gran
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A Satisfied Life, by Sally Matteson

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  I am an Upstate New Yorker, growing up in a dairy farming region between the Adirondacks and the Catskills near Cooperstown where you will find the Baseball Hall of Fame.   My parents divorced when I was young, my mom raised me alone, and I was a difficult kid. My siblings were much older than me, they were born in the 1940s. Mom was strict and if I stepped out of line, I knew there would be consequences. I watched her work a full-time job, buy a fixer-upper house and redo it and raise a daughter in the ’70s!   She did it all and I believe she taught me well. We lived in a very small town, part of a larger school zone, so I took the bus to school.   The school was one building, Kindergarten through 12 th grade, with around 400 students total. There were only twenty-eight in my graduating class.   I did what most teenagers do; crazy things with the kids from school cut classes and rode around with boys in fast cars.   I had a boyfriend who took control of my life and I fell into a b
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My Search for a Retirement Location, by Nannett Thomas

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  My search for a new place to retire began two years after I retired from the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2012. Living in southern California had become too expensive with increased state and local taxes. Wanting my pension to financially support me for decades and go as far as possible, I began looking for tax-friendly states for retirees. I have family in Georgia, so in 2015, I moved from Southern California to Georgia - which met my needs as a tax-free state for pensioners.  Observing the rising costs of goods and services, economic decline, and changing political scene - I once again began searching and researching in 2017 for economically and politically sound places to retire. This time I began looking outside of the United States of America. The other Americas were calling my name: Central America, South America, and Mexico were attractive options to me.  Countries such as Ecuador, Guatemala, Columbia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico had retiree resident visas which
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I Just Pinch Myself, by Susan Larson

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If you have read Frank McCourt’s book, Angela’s Ashes, you might have some idea of my childhood. While we never went out to the train tracks to pick up coal for heat, we experienced a life very similar.   My father was an alcoholic who died drunk on the couch,   discovered by my brother who never recovered and took his own life at twenty-seven. My mother had serious health issues and when my father died, I can only imagine the family conferences that led us to move from Seattle, WA to a tiny burg in MS to be near my father’s family. There is a lot written about the oldest child and that was me. I seem to have a strength and stubbornness that has served me well over the years. While we lived a life of deprivation, my mother’s family, who were quite well off, provided extra support at times and my father’s family was our physical anchor. My maternal grandfather sold school textbooks although we never had a television, we had books. Our set of World Books became my window to the world. Li
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Journey of a Caterer, by Crystal Provance

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I met my husband when we were both studying food and beverage at college in Pennsylvania. This began a thirty-year love affair and a shared love of the food and beverage industry. We had so many exciting years as we developed our talents and skills in large hotels, country clubs, and restaurants; to the point that we decided to go out on our own. I actually opened one of the first Coffee Cafes’ in Charlotte in 1995 that featured coffee in the morning and jazz into the night. Every jazz musician around played in my place at some point. But despite having a manager and employees, it was exhausting so around 1999, I decided to leave retail and go into catering. Within a few years, we found ourselves back in retail and opening Southern Gourmet with another catering couple, but the partnership only lasted six months because they had a young family and the hours were too demanding for them. Our dream was to build a little empire and then sell and have a nice retirement.   Suddenly, in Decemb
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Rising From the Ashes, by Elaine Frennet

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  My story begins, of course, when I was born in Denver as an only child and grew into an outdoors, tomboy girl who preferred to play cars with the kids next door. My parents liked to fish and often we would go to a cabin up in the mountains where they caught suckerfish, which they would throw up on the bank. I would build little dams filled with water, trying to keep them alive. The outdoors and nature have always been a part of my life; this is how I was brought up, but my home wasn’t a happy one.      My father was a practicing, abusive alcoholic, and one time I even witnessed him attack my mother and it was a very painful thing for this young child to try and process. When I was around eight or ten, he left our home, but he came back to get his gun. Later that day, he committed suicide. While I was relieved the drama was over, my mother was left alone and not happy being left to raise me.      But then she and my gay uncle bought a house together and I adored him. He was a very gen
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Life is an Adventure. Embrace it! by Marsha Gardner Waltz

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It was the 1960s, and I had graduated from college with a BSN; I had a job;  now I wanted an apartment! But my mother said, "No, you have to live at home until you get married. Just like your cousins!" Had my mother agreed, I probably would have been visiting more looking for a nice home-cooked meal! There was no point in arguing with my mother; I said nothing further. At that time, only 25% of nursing graduates were BSN's, and I had graduated and was working in a hospital.  But the search for BSN's was on, and I was receiving recruitment brochures from each of the military branches and large hospitals. I realized that if I took an offer from a New York, Boston, or another big city hospital, that my parents would harangue me until I came home. But I also knew that they could not do anything to undo my enlistment with the military. Remember 1968? Viet Nam? The TET Offensive? In the middle of that,  I came home one day and announced to my father and mother, "Meet L
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