My family raised our sibling and I in a number of different locations throughout our childhood.
For a few years both of us lived in an house along the Gulf Coast in Florida. I’ll never forget the fear I felt seeing an alligator about 30 feet away in the wild for the first time, and the emotions it caused me to feel. I was being a troublemaker that day by going on a natural trail without telling our mother. This wasn’t as a teenager, I was only several years old at the time with almost no experience in the woods alone. To make matters even worse, this was the first time for me being out in nature in the swamp. I could have been bitten by a rattlesnake and die having no cell cellphone in those days. But the day I ran up on that gator on accident is the day when I realized that I needed to listen to our parents. It didn’t chase me, however the gator scared me stiff. I was much happier when our dad got a new task at a dealer in Muskegon County in western Michigan. Instead of moving us to the city of Muskegon, our parents wanted us to live in a locale that’s more conducive for families and young children. That’s how both of us ended up in Whitehall in a neighborhood near Mill Pond. I loved how lush and orange the turf is in Michigan while in the Summer when it’s the rainy season. All of us even have a number of legal cannabis dispensaries open in the city after Michigan legalized cannabis for recreational use in 2019. Before then, you had to possess a medical marijuana card and drive far distances to get to the closet dispensary.