A Personal Web Page is a lot like writing one’s autobiography. You have to write about yourself or the page would be blank. But I’d like to take the opportunity to include my husband, our families … all those people who make me happy, who make me… well, ME. It might be nice to start at the beginning but since that was so long ago, and not terribly apropos, I’ll start with the here and now.
In late 1998, John and I moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, to North Ridgeville, Ohio, twenty miles southwest of Cleveland. John was retired, but I found work at a GE facility in Brook Park, Ohio; the company name is GXS and it was (and perhaps still is) the largest data center in the world. Our building is not far from the Cleveland Hopkins airport. I had the best boss, the data center director and I was her administrator. It was a great job.
My mother, Margery Estelle Young, lived there, too. Mom turned 80 on March 27, 2001, and moved in with us when her emphysema got the better of her. The last thing Mom ever wanted to do was live with one of her kids but her health condition made it impractical to live alone; she became frightened of living alone and someone finding her dead. Somehow that thought terrified her. I’m not sure if it would bother me but I’m not my mother.
There were five us living in a nice, compact, tri-level house in a small development between Westlake and Elyria, Ohio. The number “five” included the “furr kids,” Tuddie and Elvis, and eventually Midnight, our cats.
According to my mother, northeast Ohio – especially the western suburbs – was a “hotbed” of nurseries. Everywhere you looked there were nurseries. As a matter of fact, North Ridgeville appears somewhat like a village surrounded by farm country. Of course, there’s a lot less open land, or even cultivated land now. North Ridgeville is also the home of the “Corn Festival,” an item of interest that John and I looked forward to every Summer.