About the Author

As a small child, I watched and listened to everything going on around me, noticing how all the folks – human or otherwise – who crossed my path left a wonderful impression on my mind.  Somehow I mentally computed every person, tree, flower, garden, mule, horse and cow - each with a distinct personality.

At age nine I started reading long true-stories in my Mom’s books.  At ten, I started to write short pieces to read to others, and always made an A+ on them in school.  I felt I was born to write, but having no money and a one-legged dad, I was sure I could never go to college. 

Dad died five days before my high school graduation.  I married and left home, taking all my stories and poems with me.  At nineteen, I felt a prompting to write a new story about “the little boy on the mountain.”  From the first moment the stories came easily, almost fully formed and too fast to capture on paper, while the main characters quickly became animals.  Those early years spent on the mountain stayed in my mind like a running picture and stories have flowed from those images for all my years. 

Each character is alive to me as if I had birthed them through my own body.  Developing, writing and reading the stories to kids for 40+ years has shown me how little ones love a life of peace and the unity of a good family.  Now I wish to share these heartfelt stories with everyone.  Amazingly, numerous adults have also sat for hours to listen as I read them, and just like the kids, begged for more when I stopped.

I found that listening to the wind on a cool autumn day, with the colorful leaves moving in all their beauty, stirred my heart because it seemed that Nature sang her songs for me.  I felt in tune with the large acres of woods where I made playhouses out of moss.  In summer I pretended daisies were eggs frying in my make-believe pans.  An invisible Spirit spoke to me, and me to it, all the time.  Night found me crying for my mother to get the ladder and go fetch me the moon.

Often, I felt the moon casting an eerie mood over my soul, keeping her secrets from me, yet holding forth a mystery saved for a chosen few.  My wish at nine years old was to share that mystery.  Darkness of any kind seemed to cast a shadow over my freedom yet I came to feel, to know, that something was protecting me from harm.

Snakes sunbathed on rocks down by the old barn where I could plainly see them as I traveled from our little plank house up through a field and the woods to my grandfather’s old farm house, yet they never bothered me.  A Great Universal Spirit watched over me and became part of my children’s stories later in life.    

Imagination in everyone provides much knowledge when we are willing to search for it.  I learned to meditate and concentrate on the third eye, the center of the forehead just above the nose, and at times felt inspired by the knowledge being conveyed: we are all One…brothers and sisters…moms and dads and grandparents…with the family of life like a puzzle.  We must connect if we want to experience or even understand this etching of the Great Universal Spirit that makes up the fabric of all our lives.   When each of us makes peace within our own beings, we will have made peace with all souls and war will never be necessary again.  We have been fighting only our inner Selves.

I suspect most children stories are allegorical.  They hold hidden messages that must be searched for by each personality to gain what they are looking for in that moment.  When we accept the Oneness inherent in all life, we can see that all folks on earth are born right where they are meant to be.  Life does not make mistakes and OntOnt, the main character in my stories, loves pointing this out to all who will listen.

It is my belief that Earth is a schoolroom where we learn many lessons about valuing all life, including all peoples and their customs.  When we begin to hold one another in high regard, we appreciate each soul we meet because we see ourselves in them; they become a more familiar light shining on our path.

Education gives us knowledge that relieves the fear of embracing other cultures.  Intellect allows us to recognize our similarities rather than focus on the differences.  In the closing stages of life, many people notice this Oneness for the first time.  Wouldn’t it be better to learn this as we come in?  My grandfather commented on this once, after he had delivered a crying baby, saying that it made more sense to cry when we come in and rejoice as we go out, since we are going to revisit our Great Source.

Sharing life with young ones has made me aware of their feelings and just how little it takes to make someone really happy.  Reading stories to little tarts when they are young gets them to thinking and then pondering life’s secrets.  I know for sure that children never forget the messages they learn early in life, lying on their beds at night just before the lights go out and dreaming begins.  Like sponges, children soak up the messages within the stories that made them feel alive, no matter where or when they heard them.