I do not remember a time when I was not writing, having collected my first rejection letter from Readers Digest  at the tender age of 15.  Undeterred, I continued writing short stores and poetry,  was an editor of our high school newspaper and yearbook and wrote feature columns for a local newspaper.  I always assumed writing would be my career.  But as an undergraduate,  I was seduced by the world of molecules and began a love affair with science that led to 30 years of researching and teaching biochemistry.  So  my career was very much about writing, but of a very different genre than I had expected.  Retiring recently, I have begun to work on  my stash of half-finished stories, poetry and essays.  It is my hope that by telling their stories, I will be able to  honor the lives of women, and especially  rural southern women during the years following the Civil War until  the advent of civil rights.  I am a wife,  grandmother,  knitter, quilter and a pianist. I love reading, writing, spending time with  my grandchildren and traveling with my husband and our greatly over-indulged Boston Terrier, Jake.  We live in Spring, Texas and  spend as much time as we can at our lake house in northwest Louisiana, where my muse is most happily engaged.