I grew up in the same neighborhood where I live now.  It is an old, tree-lined residential community that sprang up around the University of Denver.  When I was very young, it was at the outermost city limits.  When I finished high school I headed off to college at the university, only six blocks from home.

Later on, I raised my boys in a house on the same block and they attended the same grade school, junior high and high school that I did.  Across the street from us is the observatory owned by the university.  It sits in a park that always felt like an extension of our own front yard.

All during my childhood I was intrigued by artistic endeavors.  I made world class hollyhock dolls and sold them from my orange-crate stand on the corner.  Later I branched out into plaster jewelry.  By the time I was in high school I had a truly successful business making decorative candles and selling them.  I was ahead of my time, as usual.  Candle making had not yet become the common interest it has since and supplies were not easily found.  My mother drove a long distance to acquire the twenty pound slabs of wax for me.

It seems inevitable that I would have been drawn to artistic activities as an adult and I was.  I had a career in needlework design and as a painter of landscapes.  I did not study art in school at all.  In college I majored in Philosophy and Religion and shunned all art classes.  I must have been planning to hang out my shingle as a consulting philosopher.  What I did instead was get married and eventually had a family of my own.

Along the way I studied the piano very seriously.  I was captivated by astronomy and that is a passion that has never waned.  I was so thrilled the first time that I took a grandchild across the street to the observatory, to climb the narrow, rickety ladder and stand awkwardly at the top to peer through the telescope.  My first look was at Saturn and its spectacular rings.  So it was for my grandson, too.

Since I have had my own business and worked from a studio at home, it was easy for me to take on the responsibility of helping to care for my dad in the final years of Parkinson’s disease.  I could do that and continue to work.  At about the same time, I also was able to take on the responsibility of raising a granddaughter, my namesake, who is now eleven years old.

My own watershed event occurred three years ago when I lost my vision.  That changed everything dramatically for me.  My career in the visual arts was gone.  My grandmother had gone blind from the same genetic condition.  Even so, I never for one moment thought that it might actually happen to one of us.  I not only lost the life that I had known and loved so much but I had to learn a whole new way of doing everything.  My pride got in the way, too, when I actually imagined being able to hide my blindness from my friends.  I was very quickly disabused of that notion.

I spent the first year learning new skills.  I learned how to read and write Braille, how to use an audio-only computer, how to cook, keep house, do the laundry, organize my own clothes so I know what I’m wearing and so many other things.  Then I began to long for that creative life that had driven me in the past. 

With the persuasive encouragement from friends I took up my old hobby of writing poetry and made it a mission.  The result is the book Wonder In My Soul.  This business of writing, especially poetry, has given my intense, romantic, emotional Irish soul a natural outlet.