Baby Boomer
By Kate Everson
Copyright 2011 Kate Everson
Smashwords edition
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I was the youngest of three. My sister was born in 1945, my brother in 1946 and I came along, totally unplanned, in 1948. We were known as “baby boomers,” children born after dad came home from the war.
“We didn’t plan on having you,” my mom admitted.
But somehow, they made room for me. And I tried all my life to fit in.
So I found myself making my own little world. I walked in the woods and talked to the trees, smelled the wild flowers and listened to the birds. Nature was my home.
We grew up in Ontario, first in the south, then the north. I was a sickly child, with bronchitis that made me cough and wheeze. The doctors sent us north away from the water. When that didn’t work, they sent us south again, to be near the water. I coughed and wheezed wherever I went. Dad would bring me big spoonfuls of medicine when I was coughing at night, and try to help. Once I stopped breathing and he brought me back to life. Thanks, Dad.
I guess being a wheezer had its advantages. I never learned to smoke like the other kids, stealing packages of cigarettes and smoking them all in the woods. Oh, I tried once, but the smoke hurt my throat so much I gave it up. Thank God for small mercies.
When we finally settled down in Glen Miller, in the glen of the paper mill along the Trent River and Canal, my dad built us a house made of stones he dug up in his own acre of land. We helped mix the cement in a wheelbarrow, for two cents a mix. Dad always paid us to help out.
He built the house out of stones, cement and a lot of advice from tradesmen like plumbers and electricians and builders who actually knew how to build a house. It was a bit crooked, but it worked. He even dug his own well, building up the walls with more stones.
He added on a woodshed, where he put the old wood stove that cooked our food and warmed our feet in winter. I remember mom putting a brick wrapped in flannel at the foot of our beds under the covers on cold winter nights and keeping my feet right up to it until it cooled down and I was fast asleep.
Dad built a stone fence all around the property. He also built a stone chicken coop and a stone barbeque for burning garbage. There were plenty of stones on our little acre of land, and even today you can’t dig down an inch without coming up with one! I guess it used to be a lake bed a long time ago.
It was a small house, but we fit in quite nicely. We all slept in one room, my parents in one bed, my sister and I in another and my brother alone. There was a living room and a kitchen and a shed. When we started going to high school, my dad added another room. We didn’t have indoor plumbing for many years.
I remember taking a bath on Saturday nights in the big old washtub in the middle of the kitchen. Mom heated up the water in a kettle on the wood stove and poured it in. I went first, then my sister and finally my brother took his turn. He was the dirtiest, mom said, so he went last.
We used to have a bucket and a dipper for drinking water. The water tasted good, without any chlorine or fluoride, pumped from the stream that ran under our property. We were careful not to use too much water, as it sometimes ran low, especially in summer.
My dad went fishing in the canal across the road with my brother. We had a dozen chickens in the chicken coop in the back yard, and dad would cook down the little sunfish, perch and rock bass to make a stew for the chickens.
They loved it! The chickens got to roam around in the grass, until something started snatching them. Then dad built a mesh chicken wire fence around the entrance to their coop. It all worked fairly well until one cold winter the hens froze their combs and dad had to give up his hobby.
But I’ll never forget the baby chicks. Dad would bring in an egg from a broody hen and set it on the stove in a tobacco tin and we would all wait for it to hatch. When it pecked through its shell, it was delightful! The little chick was soon taken back to its mom, where it lived a happy life, for a few years anyway.
My favourites were the roosters. They all had names, and one was called Sparkle because of its brilliant tail that sparkled in the sunshine. The day we lost Sparkle was a sad one. But we had chicken for dinner that Sunday.
The back yard was not just for chickens. Dad built a shed there where he could store his tools and “get away from the wife.” He put a radio out there and a record player and a big comfy chair. He attached a Hydro line to the house and put wood in a tiny stove for the winter. That’s where Dad wrote a lot of stories on his old Underwood typewriter. And behind that was the outhouse.
The outhouse was the most important place! The back door faced out into the woods so you could leave the door open and look at the trees. Nobody was back there, except us. It was actually kind of a nice place to be, and there was lots of reading material like old Eaton’s catalogues in case you ran out of toilet paper. Dad dug a new hole every year and moved the outhouse to a different location. And on Hallowe’en he sometimes put barbed wire around it so the kids wouldn’t push it over. No trick!
The only problem with the outhouse was that there were spiders in it. I always checked before I sat down to make sure there were none crawling up the hole!
My dad had been in the war, WWII, in bomber command flying Lancasters over Germany with the RCAF, but when he got back to Trenton where the air base was, he looked for a job.
First he built rowboats (Bluebird Boat Company) in Smithfield where I was born, but that didn’t bring in much money, so he got a job teaching public school. He taught in one-roomed schoolhouses throughout the district, all with eight grades at once. Years later, I heard from some of his former students who said he was the best teacher they ever had. And the most fun!
A few years later, my mom went to teachers’ college in Ottawa for a summer and we all stayed home while dad did the cooking. My favourite food he made was kippers and tea biscuits. The kippers were the smelliest fish you could ever get, and he had to open the door to let the smell out. He could never make them when mom was home. He also baked tea biscuits which were wonderful right out of the oven, with butter and jam. Dad even made his own bread and threw in anything he liked, even some homemade beer he made in the converted chicken house.
My mom was a good cook too and did all of the cooking and cleaning. This was the ‘50s and dads didn’t do any housework at all. While mom cooked up a big meal and washed dishes, and swept floors, my dad would sit in his comfortable chair and smoke cigarettes. The big glass ashtray stood on a steel pedestal by his chair, and mom was always emptying it. She smoked too, but not as much. Dad rolled his own, from a big can of Export A, rolled with Vogue papers. He was so good at it, he could do it with one hand, sometimes while driving a car. Mom didn’t like the tobacco coming out of the end, so she bought a rolling machine that rolled the cigarette evenly. You could do six at a time. Later, they even invented ones where you could stick on a filter.
Nobody worried about the health effects of smoking back then. Smoking was cool.
We were a pretty happy family for quite a few years until my sister got killed in a car crash. She was only 13. A drunk driver hit her as she was walking along the road with her friends. It was the saddest day of my parents’ life. They were never the same after that.
Before that, my dad told jokes a lot. After that, he never did. My mother just looked sad most of the time. That was the first time I ever heard my father cry. I put my arm around him and he looked up at me and said, “Thanks.”
That was all I could do. I missed having a sister, but it didn’t bother me like it did my parents. I got used to having just a brother, and he was the one I could talk to. He was smart, and read a lot of books so I could ask him anything and he usually knew the answer. He read Science Fiction books and astronomy and collected rocks.
My brother joined Scouts and I became a Girl Guide. We rode bikes up and down the old dirt road in front of our house. Everyone had a dog back then, and they all ran loose. Not like today at all.
Sometimes the dogs would run out onto the road and get run over. When I was little, my parents told me our dog ran away, over the hills. I waited for a long time for him to come back. But he never did. “When is he coming back?” I would ask. And they would just look at each other and shake their heads. I wish they had told me the truth.
I grew up always having a dog. And a cat. There was always some friendly furry creature to walk in the woods with. I loved the kittens, but they always got too close to the road. We named all our pets with a T, named in honour of our first cat Tiger who died from some disease. Nobody took their pets to a vet back then. Pets were expendable. They were fed table scraps and managed to survive on their own. And they were all mutts. We had Terry and Toby and Timmy, that I recall. We buried them in the back yard under the cedar tree, and made a little wooden cross over their resting place.
One of the best memories I have of the early days was learning to read. We all started out with comic books and read them like crazy. I loved Casper the Friendly Ghost. My brother liked action comics, like Superman.
When we lived up north for that couple of years, trying to get rid of my bronchitis, we lived in small town called Holtyre, near the Quebec border. Most of the town spoke French, but we had one small English school where my dad taught. The Catholic school was across the road and it was huge. We went there and played on the swings.
My dad cut down trees in the forest for the wood stove. He hauled water in buckets from the village pump.
I remember almost seeing the Northern Lights there for the first time. I was only five, and my mother did not want to wake me up, so I only got to see the last few minutes of the most gorgeous sky I had ever seen. I cried when I found out they had been watching it for a long time before they brought me out. I grew up fiercely independent, determined to never let a precious moment escape me again.
There was a wild forest all around the northern town and we went out to cut down our own trees for the stove. We used a big hand saw, with my brother and I at one end and Dad at the other. Mom helped haul them out and cut them up.
When we moved back south, it was more like home since we had our own house. Once a week was washday. My mother washed clothes by pumping water in buckets, heating it up on the wood stove, pouring it into the old wringer washer surrounded by piles of clothes, all sorted by colour. I can still see her feeding the clothes through that wringer, being so careful not to catch her fingers in there. That hurts! Then she would put the sheets in blueing to make them whiter. After rinsing the clothes in a bucket, she would wring them out and hang them all on the clothesline that was attached to the back of the shed. In winter, the clothes hung stiff in the cold. They she brought them in and ironed them all, even the tea towels and pillow cases.
It was a life of making do with whatever you had. Nobody asked for big cars or fancy TVs. We were lucky to have a tiny black and white TV with two channels. Dad would adjust the aerial when he wanted to change the channel. It was hooked up on the outside with wires.
Finally, we would get some reception and sit down two feet from the TV and watch boxing. That was my dad’s favourite. He always rooted for Cassius Clay.
Later, as we got colour, we could adjust the blues and greens on the TV to almost get a good picture. Sometimes the vertical hold would slip and it would keep flipping the picture over and over. If a tube wore out, dad would take it to the TV repair man or put in a new tube himself.
Mostly, as kids we didn’t sit inside watching TV anyway. Mom would be in the kitchen and just say, “Go outside and play.” And we did. We played Cowboys and Indians, or walked along dad’s stone fence with wooden swords to see who would fall off first. Sometimes we went for a bike ride. It was an old dirt road back then, and hardly any cars on it. There were only a few other families on the road, the Bush farm, the Gibsons and the Moores next door. We played board games and cards at home. Dad made his own Monopoly board and we played into the night. Nobody was at a loss without modern technology.
Once a week, Dad would go to the dump in Frankford with a load of garbage. We got to ride on the fenders and hang onto the ornament on the hood. I loved running boards then, and still do. It reminds me of the days when life was simple.
Sometimes Dad would bring things back from the dump. He could always find something he could use. Mom would complain that he brought back more than he got rid of.
We just had a little house but we were well loved. My parents never showed it in words or hugs, but we knew. And we also had the freedom to just be kids. We had no organized games to play, no soccer or hockey. Sometime we would play softball, using a few mats for bases and running around the field. But everything was pretty much what we made it.
I remember one summer we rented a cottage at Oak Lake. They were called the Bluebird cabins and we got to swim every day. We all learned to swim really young just in case we fell in, since we lived right across the road from the canal. In fact, I almost drowned once when they let the water out at the locks and I was caught in the current, but was saved by my Dad. He dropped his fishing pole and jumped right in and dragged me back. He never did find his fishing pole.
I really do think that kids were better off then. Too much structure leaves little room for the imagination. We made our own fun. We worked out our own problems, whenever we could. Mom and Dad were busy just getting by and no time for complaining kids.
“Go out and play!” Mom would say. “And stay off my clean floor!”
And so we played and learned and grew.
Being a Baby Boomer wasn’t such a bad thing.
Growing Up in the ‘60s
In the late ‘60s I was one of those hippies walking through Yorkville in downtown Toronto, grooving on folk music at the Riverboat and the Mynah Bird. Gordon Lightfoot sang there. There were long-haired bell-bottomed kids everywhere and it was a great decade to be alive and to be young.
“Make love, not war. If it feels good, do it. Peace.”
Flower power and a feel-good way of thinking was what we all lived by. At least we wanted to believe we did.
Rochdale opened up on Bloor Street in the late ‘60s and it was the place to be. A tall apartment building designed for “open school” was a choice young people were making instead of going to university. This was the school of life, man. What else did you need to know?
I opted out of going to university, to my mother’s horror and my father’s encouragement. I had tried teaching for four months in a one-roomed schoolhouse and quit. I just couldn’t keep the discipline in a room full of 33 energetic grade threes and fours on my own, so I bailed. There was no principal around, and I was barely qualified after a year at Peterborough Teachers’ College. Dad said I was sure to get another job, but who would hire a quitter? I started looking for other options.
I checked in to Rochdale and got a room with a shared kitchen opening out to a huge common room. I was one of the few people who actually paid rent, paying for it from supply teaching in the big city.
Rochdale was a drug haven. Whenever I baked cookies, I had hippies asking me what was in them. Naïve as I was, I always answered, “Oh, just the usual… ”
But they laughed and got high on them anyway.
Some of the rooms were great places to “crash” for anybody who didn’t have a place to stay for the night, or the week, or the month. It was all one big groove.
“I can’t smoke grass,” I insisted. “I don’t know how to inhale!”
Really?
So they set me up with a hookah and a water pipe with hash. I gurgled away trying to get a buzz off it, but was a total failure. I decided to just pretend I was stoned. That actually seemed to work better for me than the real thing.
“Hey, what are you on?” they’d ask as I tripped around the place, loving every minute of this freedom inspired era.
“Nothing!” I said truthfully, but nobody believed me. I got off just watching others being stoned. I think I absorbed their energy.
But then they set up the tea room.
You went in and sat on the floor in this dimly lit room that smelled like incense and some girl in a long flowing dress poured green tea into a Chinese cup. It was all very mellow. But then there were always drug deals going on in the darkness. Great place. I met this one guy, John, who seemed quite nice and offered me a blotter of acid, just to try it out.
“It’s just half,” he said, ripping it in two and popping the other half. “You won’t even notice it.”
The LSD was prime and really good stuff, still pure in the days before they were all cut with something else. I put it in my mouth and washed it down with the green tea.
Nothing happened.
Except for that fat boy across the room. He was trying to stand up. He was flat. He looked like a card in a deck.
“Is he really flat?” I asked my new friend. I stared at the flat boy with my mouth wide open.
“Shhhh,” John said. “Don’t look at him. And no, he’s really not flat. You’re stoned.”
A bunch of my new friends wanted to go for a walk down Yonge Street and they said I was going with them.
“I can’t move,” I said. “I can’t stand up.” And I really felt I couldn’t. What if I was flat too?
“Sure you can,” one thin guy said, and helped me up. Then he walked out in the hall and was sideways all the way down the corridor, leaning against the wall.
“Is he really sideways, or is it just me?” I asked in horror.
My friend laughed. “Jim, cut it out,” he called to the sideways man. “You’re freakin her out!”
And they all laughed. Except me. I was terrified. This was my first acid trip and I had no idea what to expect.
There were three of us, walking down Bloor Street towards Yonge. I was in the middle clinging to both of them like trees. But it was a strange world out there that I had never seen before. The shadows from the street lights were so deep. And the colours everywhere were so vivid, like I was seeing colour for the first time.
“Does it really look like that, or is it just me?” I kept asking.
“It really does, only now you can see it the way it is,” Jim said. “The doors of perception are unblocked.”
Whew.
We walked by the storefront of a Chinese restaurant. In the window was a miniature village, with tiny trees and little people and bridges. I stopped to look and they couldn’t pull me away. I got lost in that world. “Look,” I said, “Look at that!!!”
Finally, they got me away from the window.
“Look at your hand,” Jim said. “Isn’t that just as amazing?
I opened up my hand and couldn’t believe my eyes. There were fingers and veins and knuckles and it all looked like something I had never seen before in my life.
They had to tell me to stop staring at my hand, so people wouldn’t notice. It was about 3 a.m. but there were still a few people walking around. It was summer in the city.
We came to the steps of the University of Toronto campus and walked down into a grassy area. There were stars in the sky, way up between the street lights.
“Let’s make a triangle, each one standing in a corner,” said my friend. “We can make the triple sign. That would be really intense.”
“Oh, no!” I was horrified. “I can’t let go! I can’t stand on my own!”
“Yes, you can,” John said. “Find the courage. You are strong.”
I did it. I let go. We all took our positions and stared at the sky. Something came over me then that I will never forget. I lost my fear and became one with the stars. I stared and stared. When they came back to get me, I didn’t even care if we rejoined hands again or not. I had found my true self. Somewhere, out there, alive in the cosmos.
We walked downtown to a restaurant and ordered some soup. Some men came in who were dressed as women. I kept staring and asking if they were for real. My friend hushed me, and said yes, they were real.
We ate our soup with gusto. It was amazing how the soup stayed on the spoon for the longest time, just balancing. Then it went into the mouth and down. What a feeling! Everything we tried to eat was with amazement. I was Alice in a drug-induced Wonderland.
While I was at Rochdale, there were a bunch of people who were going to a cabin in Haliburton for a couple of weeks to make maple syrup. Sounded fun. So I went.
I was also asked if I wanted to go to Woodstock for some rock concert in a field but I declined. Can’t stand crowds.
The cabin in Haliburton was more my style. A little log house in the deep forest with a wood stove. You had to bring your own food or catch it. Jack, a guy trying to get off Speed, made a snare and caught a rabbit. He skinned it and cooked it up with carrots and onions. Not bad!
None of us thought to bring food. The only supplies at the cabin were oatmeal, flour, baking powder, popcorn and mustard. We tried popcorn with mustard. It takes some getting used to, but when you’re desperate anything tastes good. I tried baking cookies in the wood stove but they fell flat. We ate them anyway.
Some of us actually tried to make maple syrup. You had to sit out all night around a camp fire watching the maple sap boil. Once the water evaporated, you had syrup. As long as you didn’t let all the water evaporate.
That’s what happens when you fall asleep. We woke up to the smell of something burning. All that sap so painstakingly collected from the maples were burned to a deep brown. A big waste.
I remember waking up in the early morning in my top bunk, being really cold. Somebody had to be the first one down to light the wood fire. Nobody wanted that job. But somebody had to do it. It just was never me!
I shivered until the cabin filled with heat, then struggled into my clothes and got up for pancakes and coffee. There were about a dozen of us, mostly all from Rochdale, so mostly stoned or trying to get off drugs.
One guy walked around with only one boot on.
“Why does he only have one boot on?” I dared to ask.
“Shhh… he doesn’t like people talking about him,” I was told. “He’s a little paranoid. Don’t get him mad.”
So we talked to him like everything was normal, like he wasn’t just standing in the snow with only one boot.
There were not many females in the camp, and so there was a bit of confusion about who was allowed to do what to whom. The couples were on their own. I was a loner, so I didn’t do anything with anybody.
That Jack guy, the one who snared the rabbit and walked all around the lake three times to come down off Speed, was the only one that interested me. It wasn’t long before we were a couple and he was suggesting we hitchhike out to Vancouver.
“Let’s go to Van,” he said. “It’s a really cool place. You’ll like it there.”
So we threw some stuff in our backpacks and took off.
That’s where the trouble began. I should have known better from the time he made me throw out my favourite things, like my coloured stone candle holder and my book by Martin Luther King Jr.
“But those are my favourite things!” I cried as he threw them in the ditch.
“Have to lighten your load,” he snarled. “You can’t carry that shit around with you all the way to Vancouver.”
I sighed and did what I was told.
I should have recognized this as a bad omen. We would end up hitching as far as the rainy side of the Rocky Mountains, sleep under a piece of plastic stretched over a picnic table, then have a big fight and turn back to Ottawa. We got a room off Bank Street. I went off the pill for one month and got knocked up. We got married when I was five months pregnant. I wanted to keep this baby, no matter what.
It was a beautiful boy with golden hair and blue eyes. However, the marriage only lasted two years, as long as it took for me to save up enough money to get an apartment and move out. There were no support systems for abused women in those days, and even my parents didn’t know what was going on. I was hit, punched, kicked and controlled every minute of my marriage. It was hell. Thankfully, he never hurt the child. At least, I have that to be grateful for.
It all worked out in the end. I saved up enough money from my government job to take off with my two-year-old son. I rented a small apartment on Zephyr Avenue on Britannia Bay. It was like getting out of prison. We walked along the beach and played in the park. It was freedom.
Sometimes I took my son home to visit my parents. It was great to have a real home to come back to.
My parents were great role models for Jason. Dad took him fishing and Mom read him books about Curious George and Petunia the Duck. He learned how to grow tomatoes in the back yard and catch a perch in the river. He got his very first bike there and grew up with a stable home that I was very grateful for.
And that was when I found my guru.
Finding my Soul in the 70s
I saw a poster of Sri Chinmoy at the health food store in Ottawa. It invited people to come to a meditation on Sunday night. Something in that face spoke to me, and I was forever changed.
I sat with a group of people, disciples of Sri Chinmoy, in front of a picture of the guru and his consort Alo Devi. Candles burned. Incense of sandalwood spread throughout the room. There were a few AUMS and a couple of chants, then silence.
It felt good.
I was totally in my mind, or maybe out of it, so it was difficult for me to understand the whole theory behind meditation. It was foreign to me. The girls wore saris and the boys wore loose white clothing. Most of the girls had long hair.
One of the ladies who owned the apartment was the sister of Alo Devi. This seemed strange, but true. Alo had gone to India and met her guru and they had started a meditation centre together in New York City. Centres had spread all over the world, small groups of disciples, or followers, of his teachings. He had written many books and these were read with devotion.
I asked a few questions and then left. But I came back the following week. There was something about this group that left me with a feeling of peace. Inside, my soul soared. Meditation released me from worries of the world and replaced it with a sense of stillness and inner joy. This was priceless.
Over time, I became more involved. I learned to wrap a sari around myself for meditations on Sunday and keep fairly still through the hour. I never really bonded with anyone because it was kind of a cold group. There was no touching or hugging allowed. Disciples were not allowed to date. There was no alcohol or drugs. We were like monks and nuns on the path to God-realization.
That was fine with me. I had had enough of the social thing, and slipped into my little niche. My son was only three at the time, and didn’t really have much to say about it all. Once when the guru visited, we both got blessed. It was nice. For the first time in my life, I had a sense of purpose, something divinely guided. I felt like my guru was with me all the time.
A couple of trips to New York City were taken for celebrations of birthdays or special occasions. A bunch of us crowed into a car or station wagon and made the 12-hour trip to Queens where we stayed with other disciples. The celebrations included some festivities, and long meditations.
I stayed with the meditation group in Ottawa for a couple of years. When I moved to Toronto I joined the group there, but left soon after. I had found another spiritual group that met my needs for social interaction. It was called The Foundation Faith.
I first encountered this group through their coffee house along Yonge Street. I went in and had tea and found out about their psychic workshops and spiritual events. It was intriguing. Soon I was hooked. Within a year, I had officially left the Sri Chinmoy Centre and become a member of the Foundation Faith. We wore dark blue uniforms and went “funding” on the streets. The funds helped support us and the headquarters in Arizona.
My son was home in the big house we shared with the centre members including three children. Sometimes we were sent to other cities to raise funds, staying at whatever free accommodation we could obtain. We managed to get some free hotel rooms or stayed in strangers’ homes. Our spiel was that we were raising funds to help people. When we switched to being “Christian” it helped a lot. We were the Foundation Faith of God, and had suddenly become Christian. This was apparently an insight of one of the superiors in the group. It also helped our bottom line.
Canada to Colorado in the 80s
After a couple of years in Toronto, I was transferred to a centre in Denver, Colorado. My son and I took the train with our meagre possessions. When we got there we were given a spot on the floor to sleep. I was sick for a week.
My job was the same. Go out in the streets and raise funds.
Sometimes, my son would come with me. He was a great fund raiser. The ladies felt sorry for him. Once in Laramie Square, he got a $20 bill. He was so excited. When we emptied our jugs at the end of the night, it was a treasure. The head of the house was excited too, and started sending Jason out with me fundraising as often as possible. But he got tired of the gig and wanted to see some return for all his efforts. He started pocketing the cash and buying jellybeans and treats with it. They didn’t send him out after that.
I left the Foundation Faith of God and moved into a small flat in downtown Denver. I got jobs housecleaning while Jason went to school. It paid the rent.
After a few months, I got another job through an ad in the paper. They were looking for someone to help out on a horse ranch in the foothills. They said they didn’t mind me bringing along my son.
So there we were at Snowshoe Ranch near Kremmling, Colorado. Jason went to school with the boy who lived there, and I made beds and helped out in the kitchen. In our free time, we got to hike and ride the horses!
Jason and his friend rode around the miles of territory at the ranch and had a great time. He learned how to ride for the first time and has loved it ever since!
His friend rode bareback some of the time, but he had been riding for a lot longer than Jason. Jason hung on tight and just enjoyed the ride!
I had an occasional trail ride when I wasn’t working, and that was great fun. I have always loved horses! We stayed at the ranch for a few months, then moved to Leadville, where I took a bus every day to a ski resort at Copper Mountain. I had a job as a cashier at one of the restaurants while Jason went to school in Leadville. On weekends, we got free ski rentals and ski lift passes. We both learned how to ski for the first time!
There is nothing to compare with the Rockies for skiing. The hills are endless and the scenery spectacular. Jason soon became expert at the skill, taking on the most advanced slopes. No fear! As for myself, I preferred the slow way down, stopping to admire the view.
He would get to the bottom and wait for me. “What took you so long?” he would ask.
“Just enjoying the view,” I smiled.
In reality, I was scared all the way down!
While we were in Colorado it was a great experience for both of us. The little town of Leadville was “two miles high” and it took us awhile to get used to it, but the air was so clean and the scenery so fabulous it was something we will both remember.
In summer, Colorado is a great place to hike on well marked trails all through the mountains. In winter it is a ski paradise. How could anyone have a bad day?
Coming Home
Someone at the ranch had called the immigration officers on me and they sent us back to Canada on a plane to Calgary. Once I had left the religious group and started working, I was no longer legal working in America without a Green Card. But after a weekend with some relatives, I switched my ID to the one with my maiden name and returned to Denver. They never caught on.
But after a few months, I decided to return to Canada for good to be with my aging parents in the Trenton area. I got an apartment in Bayside and found a part-time job at the nearby municipal air terminal. That led to some fantastic free flights to northern Ontario, to Hudson’s Bay, Attawapiskat and Pickle Lake, Moosonee and Red Lake on Austin Airways and Air Ontario. Great fun!
Finally, I started writing. I freelanced some articles for the local paper and they took them. I bought a small camera and suddenly I was a reporter!
The months turned into years. My parents died and left me their small stone house by the river. My son grew up, went to university and got married. He lives in Ottawa now and has two daughters. I am a proud grandmother.
So a moonchild of the ‘60s has settled down, sort of. I still manage to take trips to places that intrigue me. I have been Scuba diving in the Bahamas, climbed hills in Sedona, Arizona, drove to the edge of Vancouver Island and been exploring all through the Celtic lands of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Am I still a moonchild? Of course! The adventure continues from home sweet home.
The End (so far)
The adventure continues with stories of my grandchildren, Shannon and Ally. Read all about their fun in Ottawa at The Adventures of Shannon and Ally and Shannon and Ally Visit Lake Ontario and Shannon and Ally Love Fall and more!