I always preface my story with: "Don't be jealous." You see, I grew up in Texas, on a farm actually, in a podunk, rural town called Muleshoe. It's up in the Panhandle. When I was three, my parents moved the family to Dallas, where my dad became a civilian contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense. I went to 13 schools, including three high schools, and lived all over the country.
During the summers, I would visit the farm, where my granddaddy would pay me to hoe his cotton fields for $10 an hour. Wow! That was a lot of money in the 1980s! Poor granddaddy was giving away the farm (ba da boom) by paying me that much, so I thought. I could dawdle. I could sunbathe. I could drink a Diet Coke. Ah, but I am from a highly intelligent gene pool. My granddaddy knew exactly how long it took to hoe a cotton field and would time me. I learned this quickly. He taught me to be a smart, hard, honest worker.
I am grateful for my upbringing and am currently writing a novel which includes some of the humorous adventures that made me who I am and taught me valuable lessons on the value of hard and honest work