My family raised my sister plus I in a number of unusual locations throughout our childhood.
- For a few years both of us lived in an apartment along the Gulf Coast in FL.
I’ll never forget the fear I felt seeing an alligator about 30 feet away in the wild for the first time, plus the emotions it caused me to feel. I was being a troublemaker that morning by going on a natural trail without telling my mother. This wasn’t as a teenager, I was only eight 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 plus die having no cell phone in those days. But the morning I ran up on that gator on accident is the morning when I realized that I needed to listen to my parents. It didn’t chase me, however the gator scared me stiff. I was much happier when my dad got a new task at a company in Muskegon County in western MI. Instead of moving us to the neighborhood of Muskegon, my parents wanted us to live in a place that’s more conducive for families plus young children. That’s how both of us ended up in Whitehall in a town near Mill Pond. I loved how lush plus orange the lawn is in MI during the summer time when it’s the rainy season. The two of us even have a number of legal cannabis dispensaries open in the neighborhood after MI legalized cannabis for recreational use in 2019. Before then, you had to possess a medical marijuana card plus drive far distances to get to the closet dispensary.