After IU, I moved to a small mining town high in the mountains of Nevada. Met another teacher, whom I married. We did quite a bit of moving in our first years while he decided what he wanted to do. Lived in Portland and Eurgene, OR, where I started my masters in history. We spent five years on the Oregon coast. It was beautiful, but cold. We ended up in south central WA. That area is definitely not where WA got its name as the Evergreen State. The climate is rated semi-desert. I loved the dry air, but where the irrigation stopped, the green stropped. So a great deal of the valley was brown most of the year. Shortly after our 42nd anniversary, he divorced me. So now I am deliriously single. After the divorce, I moved to Northeast Tennessee to be close to my oldest daughter and her family. The climate is a lot like what we had in South Bend, but usually milder. Humidity isn't so high, and there's not so much snow in winter. Of course, beiing in the mountians, pretty much everything shuts down with very little snow or ice. The kids love all the snow days.

The on-going power struggle between Mrs. Pate and Mr. Reber had its humorous moments. Mrs Pate wanted perfection for all her programs, and Mr. Reber was always in charge of all the electrical funtions. Being in Glee Club and Mr. Reber's chemistry class, I soon became aware of the tension between the two. One year as it was getting close to the glee club's annual Christmas program, Mrs. Pate sent a request for another item she wanted Mr. Reber to handle. He was not a happy camper. He muttered kind of under his breath, but loud enough for the class to hear, "I'll give her another light. When that shrew turns on her switch, she'll feel it all the way through!. Lots of snickers, but the way students were expected to behave in those days, nobody actually dared to laugh out loud.