Thanks to encouragement received from many Dundalk High School English teachers, I finally decided to use my avocation as a writer to generate good will. Although my graduation year is 1963, I've continued to keep up my writing skills, an avocation running parallel with several other successful careers, as a professional registered nurse, and home health care, and hospice administrator, military dependent wife of a career Navy Command Master Chief, and mother of two sons and grandmother. For the past 20 years, I've been the weekly free lance columnist for The Portland (Maine) Newspapers writing about Franco-American culture, i.e., the French influence in New England. This is an important topic in Maine where 33 percent of the state’s population claims French-Canadian ancestry – including, of course, my husband Richard’s family. As a result of this enormously enjoyable reporter’s beat, I now have a website: www.mainewriter.com, where links to most of my writings are available. Recently, an essay I wrote was published in the anthology “Voyages –A Franco-American Reader”, published in 2007, by the University of Southern Maine and Tilbury House Press. Meanwhile, I've been the President of the Rotary Club of Brunswick, Maine and served on numerous non-profit boards, plus, on the executive committees of many organizations including President of the Sanford-Springvale Chapter of Dollars for Scholars. In my health care career, I’ve been appointed four times by two of Maine’s governors to serve on the board of the Maine Health Care Data Organization (MHDO), an executive branch appointment. Awards include the Maine Medical Center Leadership Award received when I completed my Masters in Health Services Administration at St. Joseph’s College in Standish, Maine. Also, my husband and I received the Terrence Cardinal Cook Award for exceptional service to military families for our ecumenical catechesis work while we lived for three years in Subic Bay, Philippines. I've coordinated many seminars including the Maine Humanities Council Literature and Medicine programs at Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick, Maine; and the Bowdoin College Franco-American recognition, also in Brunswick. In June 2008, I was selected to participate in the University of Maryland’s Environmental Nurses Writer’s Retreat, in Baltimore, where I will develop an article about the home care nurses’ occupational exposures to second hand smoke while caring for patients and families in their places of residence. As an alumnus of Dundalk High School, I want to thank those who supported my academic aspirations and gave me the confidence to become a good writer.