I’m not exactly a coal miner’s daughter, but it’s close. My dad was young when he quit school and went to work to support his family; my mom didn’t finish high school either, so, naturally that was the one goal she had for me. We lived in a blue-collar community in Memphis which probably had a lot to do with me choosing Norwood as the setting for Owl in the Oak Tree. We had little money for extras like eating out or going on vacations. But the things my parents gave me cannot be bought. The whole time I lived with them I never heard them speak a cross word to one another. They were kind to each other and to the four of us. I knew they loved me unconditionally. Their parenting gave me stability, a sense of confidence in myself, and optimism about the future.

Despite me being at or near the top of my class academically no one ever mentioned college to me—not my parents, a teacher, or a school counselor. I had a wide circle of friends, the ‘in crowd,’ but with a couple of exceptions, they weren’t college bound either. Women at that time were either nurses, teachers, or secretaries, and it took at least some college education to become a teacher or nurse.

I can’t say that I read to escape my boring childhood. Reading wasn’t modeled in my home. We had a television before we had air-conditioning and if you’ve ever been in Memphis from May 1 through August, you know that’s saying something. We spent summers indoors in front of the TV. In school, when we had book reports due, I got the CliffNotes. But, I always thought I would be a writer.

I married young as did many of my peers. I owned my own home at eighteen and had my first child at nineteen. For a lot of women, that would set their course for a lifetime, but I began to want something more. My sister and I started taking night courses at Memphis State. It was hard working during the day, then driving across town to school, especially since I had a child at home, but we did it. My husband didn’t share my ambitions. My marriage suffered and we divorced.

I met my second husband, an engineer, at work. Soon after we married, he was offered another position within the company, and we moved to Wisconsin. We were there six years and I spent four at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh earning my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I was in my thirties, older than my classmates, but that didn’t bother me. I wondered if they realized how privileged they were to be able to attend right out of high school. When I was deciding on a course of study, creative writing or psychology, I chose psychology because I wanted to understand people in order to write about them.

We moved twice more with my husband’s job and ended up in Cincinnati. I took a job running a small nonprofit treatment program for chemically dependent adolescents primarily because the treatment model was unique and interesting. It was something to write about. I kept notes, wrote chapters, and started attending a writer’s critique group. What I didn’t foresee was falling in love with the staff, the kids, and their parents and spending twenty-five years there. Time passed and I finally retired . . . after learning a lot.

Presently my husband and I live a stone’s throw from King’s Island, a 364-acre amusement park. One can buy a season pass for a very reasonable fee. There are several well-equipped parks, and the community center in my town has an indoor pool with a two-story slide, a rock-climbing wall, a fitness center, and a teen area with ping-pong, air hockey, and other games. I watch kids come in to swim and play and wonder if they have any idea how privileged they are. Probably not, that’s all they’ve ever known.

I feel privileged for many things including being able to publish the novel I’ve worked on over all these years. I will be seventy-nine when it launches but that doesn’t bother me. Eighty is the new sixty, I’m thinking.