Who was she?

She loved to sketch in pen, pencil, and chalk, to paint in watercolors (transparent & opaque), oils, and acrylics...

And she painted on pretty much everything; masonite & plywood boards, metal, glass,  birch & canvas art panels, furniture, stone, and ceramics.

She was very intuitive and loved to explore.  She would prowl thrift stores on the hunt for interesting books and records, period kitchenware or furniture, vintage clothing, an occasional print or picture frame, and she especially enjoyed finding old photos.

She also loved to take photographs of street scenes and candid portraits whenever we would drive around town or journey further afield.

She also wrote, all the time.  Blogs, short stories, and poems, but also in diaries/journals.  I'd never read them before, but after she passed, I gathered them together and started to scan through them.  I soon realized that she had quite a story to tell.  In some ways tragic and sad; in other ways joyful and satisfying.

But I believe it's a story worth telling, and best of all, I could tell it using her own words!

I wasn't sure where to start until, by accident, I came across twenty sheets of her handwriting - both front and back sides - on cream-colored stationary tucked inside a book titled “My Catholic Devotions”, itself contained within a matching gift box.  After reading it, and then rereading it, I realized I'd found a true starting point for her story.  These "40 pages" of handwriting started in the Summer of 1975, almost a year after we'd moved from Massachusetts to Southern California, and that just six months after we'd gotten married at St. Anne's in Readville, MA.