Biography

Define yourself in three words: enthusiastic, hardworking, creative.  No, wait: diligent, bright, playful.  No, wait: adventurous, withdrawn, powerful.  Thoughtful, stubborn, obsequious. Comely, vacillating, freewheeling, constrained.  Unshakable.  Open.  Changeable.

I’ve been out of school for a year, somersaulting through delicious tumult, seizing and discarding words to define “who I am” and “where I’m going.”  It’s been instructive.  And a great deal of fun.

I have so much more to discover.

Which brings me to Ghana.  Literally.  I hope, in a place as different from my home as I could muster, to challenge all my conceptions and ideologies and values.  To share, but mostly to learn.

Home, to me, means the Sierra Nevada foothills in Northern California, squarely between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.  “Rescue” more precisely, which doesn’t even claim a Hwy 50 off-ramp, but which does have the same post office it did in 1850 and the most enveloping and comforting landscape I can imagine.  Rolling hills of chartreuse or tawny blonde, depending on the season; enormous oaks whose massive branches bend towards the grasses, creaking; cattle meandering past rustic barns too windblown to function.  Everything turns golden in the late afternoon, just before the taken-for-granted sunset ignites.

In ways my childhood and adolescence lives up to this idyllic portrait.  Mom and Dad made a beautiful home on the very edge of suburbia, a compromise between the Central Valley farm-boy and Vietnam vet’s desire for privacy and open space, and the classy LA County suburbanite’s desire for a well-maintained community close to amenities.  My little brothers, Daniel and Brian, and I all carved out very different niches in this landscape of intersections.  Daniel is a snowboarder and REI guru who loves triathlons, rock-climbing, and all things outdoors, is passionate about Christ and evangelizing, and is currently in his third year at Cal-Poly San Louis Obispo.  Brian, in his final year of high school, is captain of the marching band’s flag team, a singer, artist, poet, and atheist, and a kid with a sense of style.  Myself, I am a horsewoman and dabbler in all things agricultural, a ballroom dancer who loves to dress up, and a recent UC Berkeley graduate whose academic perfectionism is sustained by an earnest passion.  My mom, Beverly, has been a critical care nurse with the same hospital for almost thirty years, and as such exemplifies a kind of competence, continuity, and expertise that is becoming ever more rare as far as careers go.  My dad, Ken, is a now-retired gardener who loves being outside and nursing plants of every variety, especially flowers, the brighter the better.

... and Abbey and Chelsea

I had a love affair with horses and after years of cleaning stalls to help pay for riding lessons I bought a skeletal brown mop named Willie, an off-the-track Thoroughbred who bloomed under some TLC and elbow grease.  He became a low-key show jumper with some intelligent training from me, teaching me oceans about riding along the way.  My friends and I congregated at The Barn, our home base and reality check.  For us, at that time, it was paradise.

"A girl needs something to love when she's too old for dolls and too young for boys... a horse is good."

(more to come).

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Who wants to pin down three adjectives to live by, anyway?  The world is a potter, and I the clay.  Or is it that the world is clay, and I the potter?