Hi all...
After graduating from MLHS I went off to Maine where I attended Colby College for about a year and a half. I dropped out when I became certified to teach skiing in January of 1967 and taught full-time at Sugarloaf, USA for several years, also waitressing in that area in the evenings, babysitting and caretaking ski chalets for some out of state people. I spent several summers waitressing and sailing in Boothbay Harbor. I became engaged in the late fall of 1969 to a man from Massachusetts whom I met in Boothbay Harbor. We traveled to Hong Kong with his sister, her husband and twelve year old daughter in June of 1970, spent six weeks in Hong Kong readying their Cheoy Lee sail boat for a transpacific crossing. After ending up shipping the boat to Australia to avoid pirates and typhoons, we spent a month in Sydney, Australia and then made the crossing to New Caledonia, where we left the boat behind, flew to Fiji and were married there, flew back to the states, returned to Maine and bought a salt water farm in West Bath after spending one more winter in the Sugarloaf area.
After a house fire in 1974 and a miscarriage in 1975, we were divorced in 1976. I stayed on the farm in West Bath, Maine, until 1981, when I moved to the Belfast, Maine, area to manage an organic wheat farm. My son, Alfie, was born in 1984, and I moved to the Augusta, Maine area shortly after that, when his father ended our relationship. Iwent back to school in 1987, finished my Bachelor's Degree at the University of Maine at Farmington in 1990 and went on for a Master's Degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Vermont, finishing in 1992. I worked for an agency for two years and then started my own private practice. I have worked part-time some years in public schools (school systems generally offer great benefits, but all that red tape!!!), but mostly I work with preschool children with a wide variety of communication disorders and delays out of my home office.
I have two Arabian horses that I use for therapeutic riding with some of my clients, and I raise and train deliberately cross-bred dogs many of which I donate as prospects for Therapy, Assistance and Hearing Ear dogs (Border Collie/Lab crosses and most recently Labradoodles). I live alone since my son moved into his own apartment in town about six months ago. He is a fine young man, he has a year and a half of college under his belt and is right now working full time as a carpenter to pay off his car and save some money before he goes back to school to finish his education. He's pretty sure he wants to be a chiropractor, but he doesn't want to end up with a big debt load, so he's taking his time, which is fine with me. I still ski, once in a while and I do a fair amount of trail riding with my horses. I work way more hours than I should, so I don't have much of a social life, (not a lot of decent, available men in this part of the world…) but I do love Maine, its people and the lifestyle it's possible to maintain here. I have a nice home on about three acres, with a barn and ample pasture for the horses, five miles outside of Augusta. It's rural, but still close enough to town to be convenient. I would like to retire someday, but not anytime soon. I really like my work and I feel that I make a valuable contribution to the community of small children in this area. Of course, someday I just might find someone to support me in the style to which I'd like to become accustomed, in which case I would happily retire sooner rather than later!
Greetings to all!
Karen
