A Tree House Memoir

Growing older often catches us by surprise! As I welcomed my 70th year of life everything I knew to call normal changed. My husband John Kelly and I moved very unexpectedly from our house I loved into a villa in a retirement community. In one of the moving boxes from my office I discovered a gift that would profoundly change my life. It was from my two oldest granddaughters Ashley and Emily. It was a handmade spiral bound journal with a picture of a teacup and the words Grandma tell us your story! I couldn't imagine having the time or the courage to do it. However I promised myself to think about it as I tucked it away for someday. The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 provided me with the opportunity. Writing my memoir has been both a labor of love to birth and one of the most profound experiences of my lifetime. I could never have imagined myself continuing to see my clients remotely for our counseling sessions and then using the isolation and confinement of being quarantined as a gift of time to write. Only God could have divinely inspired me to sift through 70 years and choose what I did to write about. I learned some amazing life lessons along the way. I learned to finally see and understand that God was with me and a part of everything that has happened in my life. My life was meant to be a gift. My memoir is filled with 70 vignettes and life lessons that span my lifetime. I dedicate this book to all those I have written about and who have been so important in my journey.