My PPNs are Liberty and Autonomy.

I was born in Port Arthur, Ontario, one of the twin cities (the other being Fort William) at the head of Lake Superior. The two cities later amalgamated to become Thunder Bay. We lived in a two bedroom post war bungalow, with the attic finished as bedrooms for my younger sister and I, while our little brother had the smaller room on the ground floor, and my parents had the large bedroom.

Growing up in the 1940s was awesome!! All the neighbourhood kids spent their days playing baseball in the spare lot on River Street, fishing or swimming in the creek that ran behind the street, or playing hockey and skating on the creek in the winter.

We rode our bikes everywhere and as long as we were home before the streetlights were lit, we were O.K. We had pet frogs and rabbits and built forts in the bushes and stole veggies from neighbourhood gardens and roasted potatoes in a fire.

Fortunately the gardeners we snitched from were our parents or the parents of our friends and they knew exactly what was going on. Summers were spent at Loon Lake at our grandparents’ cottage, until we could afford to build a camp of our own when I was about 14 yrs. old.

We learned to swim, dive, lifesaving techniques, play tennis and badminton and all kinds of games. We learned to paddle a canoe and operate motorboats and to water ski. There were nature hikes with the summer guides/lifeguards. The days weren’t long enough!! We had wiener roasts and ate burnt marshmallows. It was glorious!!

The teen years brought us ELVIS….. I remember the first time he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. We were at the lake and I was hounding my Dad to get us back to town in time for the show.

Dad tended to have a heavy foot on the gas pedal and with me screaming in the back seat of the car, he put his foot down a bit more than he should have. Yup, we got pulled over by a traffic cop about ½ way to town!!

When asked by the cop what the hurry was, Dad explained that he had a teenager who wanted to see Elvis. The fellow laughed and said, “My daughter is going crazy too. Take it easy from here on.” I got to see Elvis and Dad didn’t get a speeding ticket. WIN-WIN.

After high school, I moved to Regina, Saskatchewan and took a secretarial course. One weekend, a friend I’d met during the course invited me to go home with her to a small country town a couple of hours east of the city. As fate would have it, I met my future husband that weekend. He was a grain farmer who also raised some beef cattle, chickens and pigs.

Now, you have to realize I’m a city girl and the only time I saw cattle was from a vehicle driving down the road, while they were on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Chickens and eggs were something you bought at the grocery store, not found in a little shed beside the barn.

The farmhouse had a wood-burning stove in the kitchen and no running water. The stove was wonderful on cold winter days but a killer in the heat of summer. Water was gathered from ponds or sloughs in the spring and stored in a reservoir in the basement. In the winter, you melted snow on the wood stove.

I learned to cook and bake on that old cast iron stove and my husband built on a bathroom with running water off the kitchen. What Bliss!!

When I say I learned to use the wood stove, it didn’t happen overnight. There were many “burnt offerings” before I got the hang of it and my first try at making bread – the chickens wouldn’t even eat it and they eat everything!!!

Through all the happy times and the hardships of farming, we managed to raise four beautiful children and I now have 9 grandchildren and 8 great-grands who are all delightful.

Life with my second husband took a completely different turn. He was also a farmer but deeded the land to his eldest son and with another son, we bought a small hotel with a bar, dining room and eight bedrooms upstairs in another town.

We took the required training but nothing prepared us for what we found when we purchased that hotel. That the previous owner was a bit slack when it came to cleaning is putting it mildly. There were circles of dirt ground into the carpet around all the tables in the pub that took us nearly two weeks on our hands and knees with a scrub brush to remove.

Don’t even ask me about the kitchen or the bathrooms. Gross!! No women would set foot in the place. We owned the hotel for about four years and put in a steak pit (all the rage in those years) and had the local teachers coming daily for lunch, the town council holding their annual dinners there and even young women would meet at the hotel to catch up on the news.

It was a lot of hard work but we met some wonderful people who became lifelong friends.
After we sold the hotel, my husband and I moved a couple of towns down the road and became caretakers at the elementary and high schools there.

That’s where I first encountered computers. Some of the students had left the computers on after their Friday afternoon class and neither of us knew how to turn them off!! Talk about a pair of country hicks!!

Again, after about four years, we got itchy feet and moved to Victoria, BC to manage apartment buildings. Actually, this move was triggered by a visit to my parents. We fell in love with the place and couldn’t wait to move here.

That move was quite the adventure. My husband was driving our half-ton truck, pulling a trailer and I was driving our little Mazda, loaded so full, I could barely see out the back window. Climbing some of the hills in the Rockies, he had to pass me because the car was so slow that the truck was stalling out. Then I had to keep my eyes peeled to spot where he’d pulled over to wait for me to catch up.

Driving in the mountains was nerve wracking enough, but playing hide and seek with your hubby was something else. The worst part was when we got on the ferry from Vancouver to Victoria. My small car was loaded in the vehicle section but because the truck was towing a trailer, it got loaded down below with all the semi trailer trucks.

Although we both walked that ferry from end to end several times, we never found each other. Now that was scary!!! I’d been to Victoria a couple of times so sort of knew my way around but my husband had only flown out that one time and didn’t have a clue where he was. Of course, neither one of us thought to buy a map of the island.

My car was unloaded first so I pulled to the side of the road as soon as I could and boy, did I lean on my horn when I saw him coming. He saw me, waved and disappeared in the traffic pouring off the ferry. We finally met up at the Information Booth about 2 miles down the road and I thought he was going to break my ribs, he hugged me so hard!

With the new apartment management responsibilities, we had some pretty weird and wonderful experiences and we did that until my husband suffered a severe stroke and had to retire. I dusted off my secretarial cap and after a refresher course, went back to work in that field.

My love has been gone for over 20 years now and I’m tired of living like a pauper. We had a wonderful life but didn’t make much money for all our hard work. I’d like to be able to buy some clothes from a store other than Walmart and to travel while I’m still healthy enough to do so and to help my children financially if needed.

So, I’m on to the next adventure. I’m going to be the best darned network marketer in my age bracket, in this town, in this province, anywhere or die trying!!

Look out world, here I come.