There has never been a time in my life when I didn’t love history.
For me, history and story have always been inextricably intertwined, and from my earliest memories, I wanted to know the background story of every place I went and every person I discovered in the pages of a book.
As a child, one of my epoch memories was the day I got my first library card. I had finally turned 6 years old, the minimum age to hold such a privilege. I had been reading since I was 4 and had been counting down the months to that magical birthday that would open up the world of books. My dad took me to the library that day and offered to help me, but when he saw the familiar determined set of my chin, he stepped back with a broad grin. He watched as I dragged the heavy stepstool over to the wall filled with small wooden drawers marked with the Dewey Decimal System’s organizational codes. I knew what I was looking for: as many books as I could find about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and World War 2 (some things never change). I carefully held my notebook and pencil in one hand and thumbed through the filing cards looking for my treasures. When I found something promising, I wrote down the filing numbers and titles.
My dad sat at a nearby table with his stack of Louis L’Amour novels and watched me laboriously search out and gather my historical treasures. I was shattered to find out I was limited to 10 books at a time until I had established trust on returns. I guess most 6-year-olds don’t want to check out twenty-five, one-thousand-page historical periodicals about specific historical characters and events. It took me almost an hour to choose which of my new friends would go home with me that day.
That day started my lifelong road of discovering the story of the past. By the time I was in 8th grade, I was an armchair historian. I spent hours reading historical novels, digging into AP course books at the library, and writing stories about my favorite people and events, adding my own illustrations to each creation. My dad and I often discussed the nuances and complexities of historical events, the worldview that drove them, and the resulting influence of the continued story of history.
It was natural to continue the story with my own children. Over the years, I invested thousands of hours in research, online college classes, and, of course, writing.
As my children moved up through the years of homeschooling, I began creating files of the stories I told them. In the fall of 2009, I was grappling with the grief of losing my dad earlier in the year. As my memories swirled around me, I found myself focusing on how he always encouraged me to keep learning and growing. I thought about the many discussions we had about every topic imaginable, and my heart settled around the warmth of how history always lit our fires of curiosity. I knew I needed to write my stories down. This is how America’s Story came to be.
Fun, little-known facts about me…
I grew up on an operating farm with a vast array of animals.
When I was 4 years old, I decided I was going to ride a horse. My dad, knowing that my determination would probably get me into trouble, decided he would help me to learn the skill as safely as possible. He showed me how to saddle the horse, slip a bit into its mouth, and mount from the correct side. He knew I wasn’t afraid of the big animals, and since horses can sense fear in a rider, he allowed me to ride off on my own. From then on, if someone couldn’t find me, I was probably out lying on the bare back of a horse, reading a book.
My dad used to tell me a funny story about when I was a little girl. I was 4 or 5 years old, and an adult in my life told me that I was too young and too small to do something (I don’t remember what it was–it could have been anything, really), and I crossed my arms over my chest, stuck out my chin, and said, “You just stand right there and watch me!”
This story always made me laugh, but honestly it was this rather defiant determination that saved my life in many ways (although it got me into a LOT of trouble as a kid). You see, I grew up in a cult that worked very hard to create a homogeneous mass out of the individuals who joined it. Children like me, who were born into it, were never viewed as distinct individuals…only future cogs in the system. I fought against this from the time I could talk. I was determined to be an individual even though I had no idea who that would be. I believe it was this determination that drove me to learn about strong characters (and weak ones) in history.
You’ve probably noticed that my dad shows up a lot in my stories about my life. He was truly the only adult in my childhood who cared enough about me to break the rules of the cult in order to nurture me on an individual level. I have so many memories of us doing things together. My dad loved jelly beans and kept a jar of them on his book shelf. Whenever we were studying together, he would share a few of his jelly beans with me. That jelly bean jar is the only thing I wanted after he passed away. It represented the sweet love of Jesus my dad showed me. This is why my publishing company is called Jelly Bean Jar Publications…because I want to share that same sweet, saving love of Jesus with the children and their families.
This is the motivation behind all of the stories I tell, whether they are in a podcast episode, a math book, a history book, or a series of children’s novels about a family of mice who love to keep the stories of history safe.
