Strong and Inspiring Stories of Lakeside Women

  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

  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

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