How did you get to where you are?

“The long and winding road that leads to my door….”

Grew up on a small chicken farm about 15 miles inland from where I am now. My parents moved off the farm to closer to here when I was in high school because the land was being bought for a reservoir project. Went away to college, met my Ex hitchhiking around England, lived there for a few years, then we decided to try life in the States. And here we wuz.

I’m in the second house we bought while married and bought him out of it when we divorced. Houses are now being bought as summer homes in my area for ridiculous prices but I’m not yet ready to move out.

“On a dark desert highway..”
I’m within 15 miles of the house I grew up in. I had planned to go to college away from home and move to a beach town. My dad died when I was 17 and my mom pretty much had a breakdown. She cried all the time and begged me to stay. So I went to a community college still thinking I would move.
But my mom was sick all the time and being the only girl, she made me feel responsible for her. She couldn’t make a doctor appointment, call about a bill, order anything over the phone, and on and on.
So when she passed away in 2011, my roots were pretty deep here.

“The old home town looks the same…”
Where I live right now is about a ten minute walk to my birth home.
The three residences that I lived in in-between those two were all in that same town as well.

After living in a major city most of my earlier life , due to circumstances and only available work when the economy took a downturn, I obtained work in the Countryside and loved the different lifestyle!

Discovered that I like the outdoors in Nature in a National Park much better than the fast paced overcrowded city had to offer.

Ever hear of the story of the CITY mouse vs the Country mouse?

Same idea, but it took a catastrophe to get me motivated to move away.

Best decision in the long run for me.

I woke this morning and found myself here. Magic.

My parents are native Southern Claifornians from the 1920s. They met at Cal during th ewar, and after the war my dad went to work for a worldwide engineering and construction company. So while I was born in the Pacific Northwest on the straits of San Juan de Fuca, the family always came back to the San Francisco Bay Area in between jobs.

I went to high school on the San Francisco peninsula. After college in Santa Barbara I returned to the Bay Area, and have been here ever since. I have lived in the East Bay since 1982.

I’m from small town outside of Portland, OR, where I grew up hiking and skating and smoking, but joined the navy after high school. I partied and sailed around the world a bit and had fun being free and learning cool stuff.

Met my wife in NJ, dated and moved to VA together and then I left the navy and we moved back to NJ together basically and here I am: a former west coast hippie living a boring suburban life on the east coast.

I was trying to cross an icy street in the middle of a raging blizzard. Halfway across the street, the wind blew my skinny ass back to the curb. Back to the warm office and a big mug of cocoa. The light went on in my head : “This is just stupid and unnecessary” 48 hours later I was unpacking my belongings here in San Francisco. That was some 55 years ago. It was just a lucky guess. Another in the unbelievable pile of random lucky incidents that determined my life.

I was born and raised in NE Ohio. I joined the navy at one point to get an education which I did. When I got out, I started looking for a job and found one…in NE Ohio. I stayed with that job for 23 years. Right up to the time I found out the company was screwing me on pay to the tune of about $22,000/year. And they had not intention of changing. So I asked my wife if she could live anywhere in the country, where would she like to live. She said she wanted to move south because she was tired of the snow. She wanted to be near the coast but didn’t want to live in Florida. And she wanted to have a change of seasons. I figured that narrowed the choices to the Carolinas or maybe Virginia. 2 months later I was starting a job in SE NC. That is where we have landed and where we figure we will retire.

My dad had said more than once when I was a teenager (I grew up in New York and later in Maryland) that Florida has warm weather and much cheaper than California. Then one winter day in freezing Michigan, I went to college in Michigan, I was talking to my uncle in Florida and he said it was in the 70’s and sunny. On winter breaks while I was going to school I went to Florida for a week to escape the cold.

When I graduated college I decided I was going to move down to southeast Florida, and I’m still stunned I did it. It was immediately great! Like vacation every day.

Fast forward nine years my husband and I moved to North Carolina and two years later back to Florida and then five years later to Tennessee. While living in Tennessee we were driving to Florida for a race in Sebring, FL, and we stopped in The Villages, FL to eat. I had no idea I was in The Villages, all I knew was there was live music and dancing in the town squares where the restaurant was. Later I learned I was in The Villages. We made a stop one more time a couple of years later to eat at the same restaurant.

Several years later we moved from Tennessee to the Tampa Bay part of Florida. A few years later my husband was laid off. Eventually, we looked for businesses to buy, and one that came up was in The Villages, and we bought it, and here we are. We’ve sold the business, but I’m still here. Vacation every day.

My parents built a house on the same site as the farm house where my Dad was born. The bedroom was where their dining room table is now. So when we sit there, I tell Dad he didn’t get very far in life.

I was born in NYC, and when I was a baby we lived in a borough of NYC. My mom and my dad were divorced when I was very young. Me and my mom lived in an affluent suburb of NYC until I was in 4th grade, and then we moved to California for a year. We moved back to NY – this was the mid 1970’s. Long story short, I now live about 50 miles from where I was born. I live in a rural area, with a lake and horses, and lots of woods, but the roads in the area are showing signs of development, which makes me sad.

I was born as a poor black child, in a crossfire hurricane!
That’s how I got the nickname, The Jumping Jerk Flash. ;)

Actually, I was born near the shores of Lake Ontario, in Toronto.
When I was about 3, we took a train from there to Vancouver, BC.
After my brother was born, we moved to Ottawa, Ontario.
In April, 1955, Einstein died, so we moved to Hollywood, CA ;-o
In 1956, we moved to Van Nuys, CA.
In 1974, I bought my own house in a community that’s about 2 miles south of there. I’ve been living here ever since.

I now live about 2,540 road miles, and about 2,181 air miles from Toronto.

I’ve lived 3 lifetimes before I got here. I’m completely different from the persons that I use to be.