Life on the 47th Parallel
Marty Bridgham
A Memoir - Seeking a Path Out of Poverty and Finding a Life of Fulfillment
Introduction
I began with the opening chaos in my life to show the barriers placed before me so early in my life. Unknowingly, I negotiated significant parts of life without focus. I didn't know I was afflicted with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It had not really been recognized in the 1960s and 1970s. I harnessed the simplicity that Henry David Thoreau and Sigurd Olsen tapped in their study of nature and philosophy on living in harmony with nature. I lived in a one room cabin without electricity and running water and began drawing wildlife pictures in pen and ink. I hiked daily in all weather and watched birds and wildlife everywhere I went. I found the environment equally as inspiring and influential.
My life began with a great deal of chaos when my family moved to the state of Maine. Mom was struggling with schizophrenia, my brother and I contracted tuberculosis at four-five years of age, Mom and Dad were divorcing, and our new life being raised by a single parent resulted in growing up in abject poverty. Mom set the stage for me with a basic ‘path’ that I clung to, deviated from, and ultimately returned to throughout my life. For two years in my late twenties, I lived in an old hunting cabin, experiencing heavy snow each winter along with thirty-five-degree below zero winter temperatures in Northern Maine near the Canadian border on the 47th parallel. I eked out my existence without electricity or running water while gardening, reading historical naturalists’ works, drawing pictures of wildlife and attempting to re-focus on the ‘path’ my mother encouraged me to follow in my life. I became an avid bird watcher which has stayed with me for my entire life.
I contended with my own failed marriages, found my way across the continent viewing most of the United States and Canadian provinces and, finally, left my Maine roots in the Atlantic NE behind for my new home in Washington’s Pacific Northwest, again on the 47th parallel near Port Gamble, WA, a quaint little Maine town replica. I had to overcome a confused patchwork of education, numerous jobs, and developing a career. Along the way, I found that my life vacillated through a lifelong passion for birding, hiking, back-packing and naturalism.
Also, inflicted with anxiety, depression, ADHD, and dietary restrictions, I finally met a woman, Laurie, the love of my life. Combining her education, knowledge and unmatched compassion and empathy, she could see past these afflictions to the better part of me. We connected right away and moved forward to build our dream home using century old materials with the focus on sustainable, recyclable and natural. We negotiated the daily ups and downs of American life and kept family in focus to the best of our ability as we navigated through life’s jungle to make our way finding fulfillment and happiness in our journey together. Now, in our early 70s, as things began to stabilize at near perfection on my ‘path’, I was faced with unexpected events that redefined my outlook on life.
Book Excerpts - Life on the 47th Parallel
Becoming a single parent with three children is a fast way to find poverty. Most poverty originates from broken families. We found innovative ways to live our lives productively. At that time, there was no assistance or breaks given to poor people. And, it wasn't likely to garner such support with the help of rich politicians. They had never experienced starvation or running out of heating oil. Not having a winter coat or a decent pair of shoes is not an experience I wish on anyone.
Once we arrived in Ellsworth, Mom found a cheap apartment on Spruce Street in a poor section of town, but was a fun place to live with all the kids around in the neighborhood. We fit right in and made friends quickly. One day, a group of us got together and went down the street to a field with apple trees. Of course, where there are both apples and kids, someone would begin to throw apples. A good-natured apple fight broke out behind an abandoned building near the ‘dairy’ where we would occasionally buy an orange creamsicle for a nickel. Apples began flying everywhere. Next thing you know, the old abandoned building became the target when some of the kids began to hide next to the building.
Starving children is a reality in the United States and around the world. Until you have experienced it yourself, you will never know or understand the plight these families endured. A lack of resources, assistance and education all play a role in this dilemma.
“One, two, three, four, . . . . . . . twenty-five. One, two, three, four, . . . . . . . twenty-five”. This was the way my mother equally rationed out cooked rice kernels or pieces of pasta to my brother, sister and I during the last few days of each month. Sometimes the last two-three days were without food altogether. Unlike our previous accommodations, our current home was a dilapidated old apartment on Spruce Street in Ellsworth, Maine during the early 1960s before the state government food program began for the poor.
Even if you do escape poverty, as most people find out, you are more than likely to suffer set backs during your life.
Poverty 1960s
As the fourth week of the month approached, we all knew the routine. Mustard sandwiches on day old white bread and unleavened pancakes with peanut butter were staples in the menu of the day. Rarely would we run out of salt, but that added a new dimension. Since we did have a large inexpensive supply of sugar, we often made fudge, cinnamon rolls or cinnamon toast. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to whip up some butter sandwiches to go with our tomato soup made with ketchup and hot water after we ran out of the eleven cent cans of Campbell’s tomato soup.
Finding interest in things to do was difficult to achieve during those years. There were no computers, electronic games or cell phones, crutches of modern society.
1963 Bangor, Maine – Court Street – Fourth Grade
By fourth grade, Mom had moved us once again. This time to another street in Bangor named Court Street. My memory of Court Street is short and fractured. During the winter, we would jump out of our second-floor apartment window into a snow platform that was created from snow that had been plowed up against our building. We’d maintained an ordnance of pre-made snowballs on the platform to surprise passersby until they all turned into ice balls. Across the parking lot, giant icicles on the neighbor’s house precariously hung down from the second floor to the ground. We would usually knock down icicles by blasting them with snowballs, but these icicles were massive. If they came down, we could only imagine what would happen. Fortunately, we left them alone as, again, safety ruled.
Playing team sports was a valuable learning experience. Besides learning individual skills, you would get an opportunity to witness the leadership of teams, the coordination of common team goals and camaraderie. Good sportsmanship prevailed under the right leadership.
While we lived in Bangor Mom began to encourage me to play baseball. She would tell me I could be part of a team, working together with a common goal. She was always encouraging me with activities and would do what she could to get things we needed to do them. Since I loved baseball due to Mike’s influence on me while collecting baseball cards, I joined the Bangor ‘farm league’. It was also a game that was encouraged by Mom and the baseball mitt gift from Dad. I didn’t really have any knowledge yet of the love of baseball that Dad and Grandad both developed in their youth. They both played baseball and Grandad coached the Machias ‘town team’ when he was older.
Once we moved to Ellsworth, life really looked up. There was so much to do that you would have been hard pressed to say you were bored. I loved reading but often had difficulty concentrating. My wife often speculated that I exhibited attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) behaviors based on my current adult and childhood difficulties with focus, activity level and impulse control. This could lead one to a conclusion that I possibly had attention deficit disorder (ADD) or ADHD. Mom always read and promoted reading. Sometimes she would read a book out loud to me when I had focus difficulties. That didn’t stop her from pushing long books in my direction such as, Hawaii, which was almost a thousand pages long. Our Ellsworth home, on Pond Avenue, provided unlimited activities and experiences.
Learn to recognize compassion and empathy and you will become more compassionate and empathetic. We are surrounded by kind, caring people in this country. TheThanksgiving basket was life-saving to us.
During thanksgiving time at the end of November, we were destined for absolutely nothing special to eat for the holidays. Although we received our new monthly check, when we moved from Bangor to Ellsworth, the monthly free food program was no longer available. Things were tightening up again somewhat. We knew there was an annual food drive and waited and hoped for a knock on the door. It seemed like ages with no one coming all morning, then suddenly, when we were gut wrenchingly out of hope, there was a knock. We were in disbelief. It was like God reaching down to us when we were so very desperate. It was a turkey, not a small one, but a big one, enough to feed the whole family with stuffing, gravy, and cranberry sauce. The people at the door were so kind and caring. We were speechless. I wanted to thank them every day for the rest of my life. These people full of kindness, love and empathy were a miracle in our eyes.
Dad, during WWII
Like a lot of teenage boys during the war, Dad wanted to join the military, but he was fifteen or sixteen at the time just before WWII ended. He would still sit on the tailgate of the military trucks whenever he and his friends could get away with it as the army traveled through town. Grandad was not of the age to be in the military. He began cutting hair as a young man in Machias, Maine. As the local barber in Machias, which continued on for fifty years, everyone in town knew him as all men migrated through his barbershop on a regular basis for haircuts. Before he lost his leg from the knee down due to poor circulation problems, he was also the town team baseball coach. Dad used to sit on the town team bench as a trial after being a star pitcher for the Machias high school team.
Our good friend, Mark, asked my brother, Mike and I if we were interested in a job for the last six weeks of summer in 1967. In the 1950s, Maine was the largest producer of wild blueberries in the U.S. and, in 1967, Ellsworth still had a Herrick Blueberry canning operation. I was about to start high school and we needed money for clothes and school supplies for the year. A $1.65/hour was a windfall to us! And so, with a resounding “Yes”, Mike and I went to work during the last weeks of summer while listening to Red Sox baseball games on the radio in a dark warehouse. Hot cans of freshly cooked Maine blueberries tumbled through the opening in the wall at the front of the warehouse onto a metal track and rolled the length of the building, banging against the rails every inch of the way to its destination, our waiting hands. In the beginning, this wretched noise echoed throughout the building and wore on our nerves. You’d get them in groups of ten-to-fifteen cans with a gap of time before the next ones rolled in. The noise was torturous.
Although Mom never drank alcoholic beverages, she did have a habit of smoking cigarettes throughout her life. She had a nicotine addiction along with her food addictions that she just couldn’t or wouldn’t try to break. Since the 1960s, the percentage of smokers in the U.S. has dropped by more than half, but is still a leading cause of death. We never really talked about her smoking, but she knew it was an unnecessary cost to our family. She would manage the cost by buying only a few packs at the beginning of the month when we had some money, then pick butts out of ash trays when she ran out. Back then, you could buy a pack for $0.30. She would always discourage us from smoking through our growing up years and especially emphasized the ‘germs’ you could get from smoking another person’s used cigarette.
Fishing
Fishing was introduced to me at the early impressionable age of six or seven by my father. While on a summer vacation at my grandparent's home in Machias, Maine, Dad gathered up a bunch of us kids and headed out to the shore of the Machias River down below the bridge in the middle of town. It’s a storybook little town that made you wish you had grown up there when you saw it. The Machias river was a historical river that inspired stories about the magnificent Atlantic Salmon migratory spawning runs that used to thread their way up the river and ultimately into hundreds of tributaries, streams and brooks for which Maine is famous. There they spawned and perpetuated the cycle of life for the only eastern anadromous species of great salmonids. Dad told me stories of how he, as a teenager, would fish the same area and hook one salmon after another (8-20 pounds each) attracting people to gather on top of the Machias bridge to watch. He never landed any of them because he was ill equipped without a net or the skill of landing fish by hand, but it was entertaining to witness.
At our high school, as in most schools, a few students were identified as the ‘germs’ of the class by prejudiced antagonists for various reasons. Like me, the germs were usually always poor. Was I a germ? I treated them as I would expect to treat anyone and they liked me for it since they tended to be targeted simply because they stood out as poor. They were often bullied by cruel people, even if it was done clandestinely. I refused to let bullying influence the way I would interact with people.
Back to Bangor
Since I was sixteen, I had this draw to go to the Pacific Northwest. After reading Field and Stream for years, I would often dream of going to the Pacific Northwest. Nature, the rivers, mountains and the allure of Puget Sound was stronger than ever after I left Ellsworth. It was a strong instinct, as if I were a migrating salmon instinctively traveling thousands of miles following the scent of a few molecules to navigate my way.
Bangor Bog
My favorite course at Bangor H.S. was advanced biology. The teacher, Mr. Simpson, inspired me to study and reinforced my love of nature. He even scheduled a trip for him and I to go to the Bangor Bog to study the bog, long before it became a notable ecosystem warranting protection. There were stunted black spruce trees in the bog close to where my sister, Kathy, lives today. She loves that bog as I did. Mr. Simpson encouraged me to harvest and keep a black spruce that was sixteen inches tall. It is not something that I believe either of us would do today in such a protected area.
Preserving the Land
Following my experiences and learning about nature, I began thinking more about preserving what we have in this world. In Maine, our license plates called it, ‘Vacationland’. I was always proud of that. Over the years, though, I began to see more trash on the roadside during my visits to Maine than in the past but, almost nothing compared to Washington State where I live today, sadly. The amount of litter pollution on our roadsides shocks me. We’re dumping garbage in our home, basically. Litter doesn’t even begin to account for our disregard and lack of respect for our land. The land is our legacy for our future generations.
The Path and Where It Would Take Me
I had accomplished the goal Mom always touted as ‘the path’ to success and I had made it to the threshold. Since my interest was in wildlife management, thanks to Mike’s trailblazing, I applied to the top two wildlife schools in the country at the time, Oregon State University and my own University of Maine (UMO), right in my back yard. I applied for financial aid at both schools, which was paramount in following this path to the west coast. It was spring of 1971 when I finally received acceptances from both universities. I felt nervous because some people I knew had received acceptances as early as December and January. However, it wasn’t long before I was notified by Oregon State University that financial aid was not available to non-residents. My dream of moving to the west coast would have to wait.
Mom's Guidance Coming to an End
Mom began asking me to do the exact opposite of everything she had taught me to do, pursue my education. It would be my ticket to escape poverty. It would be an example for my siblings. We talked for hours on the weekends where I would be holed up in a phone booth at the end of my dormitory wing. I repeatedly encouraged her to work through her fears and even go to college herself because she was so smart. I hadn’t really understood the awful challenges she faced in doing such a thing. I still did not fully understand her mental condition and all the fears that she struggled with daily.
University Life
As the months progressed, I began to skip certain classes. I found getting up for an 8am class in the winter and walking in freezing cold temperatures a mile through foot deep snow to get there was not something I wanted to do. And, that was the short cut across campus. I was drifting from my goals. Mom set me on ‘the path’ and I was not following it. My grades dipped sharply to a ‘C’ average for the first year. I was losing focus rapidly. I spent more time playing intramural basketball and horse play around the dorm. Other activities included snow-ball fights, Friday night pizza delivered from Pat’s Pizza where you could get for one dollar a ten-inch hamburger pizza, and three on three dormitory wing tackle football. It was a wild free-for-all with passing and running in a corridor hall no bigger than, maybe, five feet wide by ten feet high. It was utter chaos including crashing into the walls and each other. The games would only last until someone was mildly injured.
Mom's Progress
Eventually, I told Mom I would help her with applying to college, yet miraculously, she moved forward herself and enrolled in Bangor Community College in Law Enforcement. Her confidence and self-esteem peaked as she earned high grades which she so proudly shared with me each time they were published. She achieved a 3.5 GPA, and graduated with an Associate’s degree in two years. I was excited for her. It was very inspiring to see and also made me realize for myself that I had a lot of my own growth and development to undergo in addition to the academic hard work necessary to excel in college. Shortly afterwards, she applied for and landed a job at the ‘Eastern Task Force on Aging’ where she took great pride in helping elderly people in need. This is where she successfully stayed for years. I was just so proud of her.
When I was living with Dad in south-central New Jersey, I began thinking about taking a trip into New York City. When I heard from Geoff that he was going to work in Ramsey, New Jersey for the summer, we connected by phone and planned a trip to see the ‘Big Apple’. He had landed a job at the Ramsey post office and was staying over the summer with his relatives that resided there. I drove up to meet him and we had already decided to take a train from White Plains, New York to the middle of New York City. As we cruised through the suburbs, every other building in the Bronx had boarded up windows. I saw boys playing basketball without nets, just like Mike and I did in Bangor, Maine when we were younger. They were having a good time in the tenements despite the hardships they faced.
Birding Fever
With a Cheshire grin on my face, a glorious symptom of the birding obsession, I headed not east, but detoured west to the Pacific Ocean where there was much to see before traveling across country.
Birding was fantastic on the coast, but few lifers were waiting for me. Disaster almost struck when I left my only Peterson’s Western field guide on Ruby Beach during the incoming tide, an accident for which my absentmindedness was to blame as I routinely ogled the birds with deep concentration. Intense singular focus on birds impacted my ability to see or hear anything else. After running a half mile along the beach losing a step for every two that I took, I managed to snatch the guide up just before the tide swept it away.
A Deep Intimacy with the Environment
The American prairie evolved in a way no other prairie in the world changed. Partly responsible for the rich earth-covered base of pulverized rock was the wave of continental glaciers that had a way of pushing and shoving the earth around anyway they wanted. The rich, aerated loamy soils sported grass that “once was taller than a man on a horse” and the variety of plants that withstood fires buried their roots up to twelve feet deep allowing them to restore the prairie in its pure state, over and over again (Lemonick, 1986, pg 42). Because few trees could get a grip on the land due to fires that spread for weeks in the winds, it remained a prairie. Short and tall grass prairies, as well as prairie marshes, emerged along with bird species such as prairie falcons, prairie chickens, mountain plovers, willets, upland sandpipers and many more. Mammalian residents of prairies include black-footed ferrets, badgers, swift foxes, blacktail prairie dogs and thirteen-lined ground squirrels and others. Sadly, except for scattered small reserves, the short and tall grass prairies have all but been wiped out by the cow and the plow, the fence and cement, and tar and the car.
A fiddlehead, is the coiled young frond of a fern just breaking ground in the spring. Some species are edible. In northern Maine, the cinnamon and ostrich ferns are the most common edible ones. The name speaks for itself as the tightly coiled head with robust stalk resembles a tiny fiddle. The crisp rich green stems appear similar to a fresh garden green bean, but the flavor is entirely different and is a delicacy to those who know what they are. Raw or lightly steamed, they snap off in your mouth and are delicious tasting unlike any other vegetable on earth.
There is no such thing as cabin fever when you live in a cabin. After spending two years in my late twenties in northern Maine occupying an aged and deteriorating abandoned hunting camp in the woods, I discovered this to be the case. On the contrary, it was everything Thoreau declared it would be. With no running water, electricity or phone, I was relatively secluded living harmoniously without distractions in the beauty of my surroundings.
Birding in New York
I was fortunate to connect with some accomplished birders in upstate New York to bird with and began assisting an expert bird bander, Ken, banding birds and collecting data along the shore of Lake Ontario. He taught me a lot during our few weeks together and eventually commissioned me to draw a picture of a northern saw-whet owl nestled in some pine boughs. I also met the founder of the Derby Hill hawk watching site, Dr. Fritz Scheider, who invited me to go birding with him as we were clearly both obsessed and enjoyed each other’s company during the Audubon field trips that he led and I had attended.
Birding Texas
I would make a birding trip to Texas in late summer followed with a flight to Washington from Texas. I loved the mountains and rivers in the Pacific Northwest and all that nature had to offer here. I knew the next stage of my life was kicking into gear and it was time to return to Mom’s ‘path’ again.
I couldn’t continue to keep bouncing around never getting my feet on solid ground like we did as a family with Mom when I was young. I don’t know what caused me to live this way and couldn’t help but think that it had something to do with growing up in poverty, struggling at times. I wasn’t poor except by choice, now.
Green Kingfisher on the Rio Grande
Before my trip I had heard stories from my fellow birders who traveled to Falcon Dam from New York about their failures to turn up a green kingfisher. One contemporary had failed in six trips. This seemed inordinately high but I was determined to avoid being added to the story list. Dickcissel, loggerhead shrike, white-winged dove and more added to my life list while in Texas another day! As I sat at dusk listening to the trickle of water, I recounted the long days of study and decided that I had one last chance in the morning for the green kingfisher.
Steelheading on the Olympic Peninsula
Bill and I thought the Elwah River, about six miles west of Port Angeles, looked like a great river to fish. The river that threaded its way out of the Olympic National Park was dammed in the early nineteen-hundreds. It eventually became the site in 2012 of one of the largest dam removal projects in history. Prior to the dam removal, we fished it in the 1980s. We found a vacant parking area that the State of Washington built on the road-side to allow river access. We were able to climb down from the parking area and found ourself on a beautiful section of river that felt very wild. It was a rough hike hanging onto small trees as we climbed down, wearing our heavy waders.
On a Path Building a Career
My team in our new publishing department worked extremely hard at learning the software and hardware including the Unix Operating System and networking. I studied the Interleaf System and built the first technical manual template for the project. We began to demonstrate building sections of hardcopy technical manuals for different departments, converting them to typed text using optical character recognition (OCR) software, scanning images and merging them into a single fully formatted fifty-page document using the Interleaf software template, all in less than twenty minutes. It shocked our customers and their view of digital publishing was suddenly ready to move ahead. In the first year, Dale and I and our talented team produced over a million dollars’ worth of technical manual conversions.
A New Job Across Puget Sound
My new job was a walk-on ferry ride from Bainbridge Island across Puget Sound to Seattle and a walk up the hill to my new office on the sixteenth floor on Fifth Avenue. I was about to embark on an estimated fifteen-hundred ferry trips across Puget Sound over the next few years. I never tired from viewing and experiencing the magnificent Puget Sound despite the weather conditions or the time of year.
My ferry trips were backdropped by snow-capped mountains from the east and west, fourteen-thousand-foot Mt. Rainier to the southeast, and surrounded by bays, coves and inlets. The views were never ending. Huge cargo ships and barges drifted past; speed lost in the vastness of Puget Sound. Nothing moved fast. Everything became an ephemeral stroke on a magnanimous canvas.
Laurie, 1997
In December, 1997, I received a phone call-in reference to my former step-daughter. My divorce from her mother had officially ended almost a year earlier. The woman on the phone identified herself as Laurie and said my step-daughter was a regular guest at her home visiting her high-school teenaged son. She was calling me to share a concern. Laurie had a sweet voice and demeanor which I found myself drawn to immediately. We hadn’t yet met, but Laurie and I connected right away. Up until then, every relationship in my life was with a ‘taker’. It was not until Laurie and I met that I realized she was not like that. I needed a ‘giver’ in my life. I thought, “what a refreshing change”. I realized just how much my past relationships had lacked this genuine quality.
Finding Home
As I drove along the main road and approached the old cedar fence lined entry into the property, it opened up majestically with flat open areas on both sides, large trees on the borders, and a long winding road entering through the fenced field ending at the house. We both knew this was home. There stood an early 1920s chicken barn converted into a house in the 1970s on almost seven acres of land with a view of a forested valley below us in front of a panorama of the Olympic Mountains. It was truly extraordinary. We had both fallen immediately in love with the property.
My Final Move
It was 1999 when I moved one last time in my life. By then, I had moved over thirty times, lived through poverty, lived in harmony with nature, traveled across the continent only to find myself ending up back on the 47th parallel over three thousand miles across the country. I had been seeking completion of the ‘path’ Mom had set me on for fulfillment. I found and married the love of my life and together we were about to build our dream house and future together on top of a hill overlooking nature and the Olympic Mountains.
We had succeeded in completing the construction of our home which was an extremely difficult undertaking while working full time. We chose to do most of the work ourselves because of the cost and our stringent requirements associated with keeping the home as ‘green’ as conceivably possible. We took pride in every eco-friendly aspect of the process. We chose to build using mostly reclaimed or recycled materials, low or no chemical treatments such as paints and floor coating, implementation of passive and eventually active solar, and radiant floor heat.
Bonnie Passed Away at 98 Years Old
We were fortunate enough to have Laurie’s Mom, Bonnie, live with us in our home a couple of times when she was having health issues. She enjoyed telling us stories of her life, especially years from the Great Depression. I always enjoyed her positive attitude and found her refreshing even when afflicted with dementia in her later years.
She liked her independence and never wanted to inconvenience others ever, had a strong desire to be productive, help others and never wanted anything for herself. She never saw the negative, only the positive in everyone and everything and was a very humble, kind and loving woman.
An Unexpected Obstacle in my Path, 2024
Laurie and I were a team that built the home of our dreams together. We both retired from our careers in our 60s. I was now over seventy years old and believed I was in a very good place in my life. I had succeeded in securing all of the things I wanted to achieve on my path. However, despite all that we did to maintain our good health and conditioning, I still had a genetic issue with high blood pressure that we could not fully resolve with our diet, medications, and various doctors I had seen over the years. Our life took a drastic detour one day when Laurie and I were together downstairs in our home and I felt a warm rush from my chest migrate up into my neck.
Over my life time, I migrated from the 47th parallel in the far northeast, Maine, to the 47th parallel in the far northwest, Washington. My cabin in Maine was basically on the 47th parallel as well as my new home in Washington State and I couldn’t help but think there was something significant about that, but what? I was amazed and intrigued by how beautiful both states are. Dad grew up in East Machias, Maine during the 1930’s and 1940’s when loggers were known for their presence throughout Maine. As their operations grew, loggers made their way west to Washington State. Eventually, they built the town of Port Gamble, WA which became a base location for their timber operations in Washington.
Becoming a Steward of What we had been Lucky to Receive
My focus became the condition of the world, about trying to be a steward of what we had been lucky to receive. Our home is built using mostly recycled materials. We have a lower carbon foot print by integrating passive and active solar capture, eliminating significant energy usage from power companies. I had already lived two years in a rustic cabin with only spring water and no electricity while cultivating organic veggie gardens many years earlier when I lived in Maine. Now, we have taken that all to a new level. For us, it’s always been about our working together on the same path, side by side. We have grown together with common goals and have come a long way. It was clear I was finally living the path my mother always wanted for me that I had followed on and off throughout my life. It was our path now. It felt right and I have arrived feeling at peace and content.
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