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.