I was born at the beginning of the Second World War, evacuated from Berlin during the Allied bombing and chased out from our house 
at Lac Constance by French troops in 1945. My mother, pushing a pram with my sister in it and me tagging along, spent months as a refugee on the road before finding sanctuary at my grandparents in southern Germany. I cherished my education in the Helene Lange Boarding School in Markgroeningen, which opened my mind to the treasures of music and literature, the power of feminism and the possibility of civil disobedience, a new concept after the mental stultification of the Third Reich. I set out to study literature and then medicine in Heidelberg and Munich. Halfway through my program I met and married Jim and in 1964 I immigrated to Canada.
Son Jamie was born in 1965. In 1968 I began teaching in Victoria Composite High School in Edmonton, Alberta. When Jim earned his B.Ed. we moved to northern Alberta where we both taught in a small Metis colony. Next to our teaching we began farming. We purchased and broke land in the Peace River country and built up a 4000 acre mixed farm mainly raising Maine Anjou cattle. After selling the farm in 1990 we moved to Hines Creek and now in our mid fifties adopted two children. Two years later we took a year long Leave of Absence from teaching and backpacked with our two pre-teens through Asia and Europe, an adventure which resulted in my book “Borobudur By Chance”.
Jim and I retired from teaching in 1996. We sold everything and moved with two teenagers and two dogs first to Malta and then to France, but we missed Canada and a year later all six of us came back home again. We bought five acres in the South Okanagan Valley, built a house, planted a U-Pick orchard and started a B&B, (www.bbcanada.com/6357.html), which we very much enjoy because it brings the world to us.
I love classical and Kletzmer music, the Goldberg Variations, the missa criolla and watching couples dance the tango in Buenos Aires; some of my favourite books are Middlemarch, The Stone Angel, A Fine Balance, The Adventures of Augie March, The Master Butchers Singing Club and the latest Thirteen Moons; I enjoy the powers of observation of Georg Lichtenberg and Heinrich Heine, I treasure the poems of Eduard Moerike and Rilke and would make Marcus Aurelius and Thomas Paine mandatory reading for all elected and appointed public servants; I am drawn to museums, art galleries and Romanesque churches; I admire people of peace such as Scott Nearing, Tommy Douglas, Nelson Mandela and Grandin Temple; I enjoy beach walking, gardening, cooking and eating Bismarck Herrings.