Great stories, everyone, and Freda...just from your posts on MC I'd say you have a very superior and creative brain!

I started out wanting to be a painter, but 2 years of night classes at UCLA proved I was up against a bad case of no talent. OK, barring that I wanted to own a coffee house where I could preside over interesting BS conversation and play my guitar and sing Olde English ballads. Well, I sang in a lot of coffee houses, but never owned one. Went to Europe when I was 19 and vowed to go back for longer. Was just getting ready to embark on a 6-month stay in Spain when I met John...and we were married 3 months later. I just assumed I'd have children, but that didn't work out either. And my fill-in job as a tech typist, slowly turned into being a tech editor, then tech writer, and I--who had never held a job for longer than a year or so--ended up running the art department of a computer research firm for 7 years.

Then life took another turn. John, at 38, had a very bad heart attack, and nearly 2 years later we were the owners of a 160 acre Ozark hill farm. I could no more have imagined myself in this place at 23, than I could imagine becoming a deep sea diver. We lived there for nearly 13 years, running cattle, raising all our food, doing all our own butchering...a real back to the land trip, and honing our skills at being studio potters.

Allergies finally drove us back to the West Coast. Getting re-established here was difficult, but we somehow managed to build back a great and enthusiastic client base for our pottery, readjusted to 5 acres, rather than 160, and made a wonderful life here. The only thing missing was music. Pottery was for us, anyway, a highly rewarding but high energy-low paying career, so there was little time for much else. And altho John and I shared many things--aesthetics, philosophy, a love of living in the country, our dogs--he had absolutely no interest in folk music; in fact, tho he tried to be nice about it he found it monumentally boring. So I found myself playing my guitar less and less.

3 years ago John died unexpectedly. And my life has taken another turn, altho sometimes it feels like I've come full circle. I was devastated for a long time after John's death, and to pull myself out of this pit I decided to start volunteering with Hospice to play in critical care facilities. From that time on music has steadily become an ever bigger part of my life. Through Mudcat, and lots of good luck, I've found many people to share music with, have regained at least some of the youthful confidence I once had for playing in front of an audience. Although the pottery died with John, I've taken up an old love, photography, and am having some small success with this. And my life is suddenly full of people, wonderful friends and acquaintances. John was a bit of a recluse, and over the years we had both become somewhat isolated. So I am celebrating the rebirth of many of the things that were important to me as a kid.

True, I never got the pony I prayed for, but I have had 40 truly remarkable years with an amazing man, and am both astonished and grateful to find another life now emerging. I've got a home I love in the country, 3 great corgis, friends, music and the ocean just 35 miles away. At 23 I never thought about being 66, never thought I would get that old! But if I had been able to imagine that, I think this is the life I could well have imagined for myself, as well.