About

Typical Thanksgiving gathering at my house, my FULL house!

I’m a reader. I learned to read in Portuguese at the age of five when my family lived in Brazil. The only child of older parents, a pilot and a teacher, I had a somewhat unorthodox primary education. I attended thirteen different grade schools in eight states, plus a year of home schooling, long before it became popular or even legal.

Because we moved so much, I didn’t have close friends, so books – and the characters in them – became my friends, companions, and mentors. I moved from Winnie the Pooh books to the Oz books, to teenage adventure and mystery, and the biographies of Marguerite Vance.
We settled permanently in San Antonio when I started high school. My friends were all readers, too. I remember exactly when Leon Uris’s Exodus came out. We all talked about it at lunch. Looking back, we must have been pretty serious kids.

I’m also a dog lover. My daddy brought my first puppy to me in the pocket of his flight jacket when I was three years old. One of the reasons I chose to attend Southwestern University in Georgetown was that I could come home and see my dog. When my husband of thirty years died in 2005, and my elderly dog soon after, I adopted a rescue dog whose antics soon became the inspiration for my story.

After forty-four years of teaching middle school history and Spanish, two husbands, two children, and five grandchildren, I retired to the Texas coast twelve years ago to a cottage and village not unlike my fictional setting of Copano Beach. Although I had published an educational book in 2002, History Fair Workbook, I had always wanted to try fiction. Training Freddie: The Adventures of the Widow Merle McKinney and her Indomitable Sidekick Freddie, The Smartass Terrier is my first novel. I do plan a sequel, possibly several.