Of course I finished college and started teaching. I taught for 21 years. I quit teaching after 21 years and entered an Episcopal convent.

By that time, my husband and I had divorced, and by that time our son was grown and not home anymore and I was home by myself so I thought well I didn’t go into mission…

See his agreement, if I would marry him, he would finish his schooling and we would go into mission work together. But you know, promises are promises and they don’t always work out. That didn’t work out.

So after my son graduated from high school here in Findlay, so many of his friends their parents worked at Marathon, and they were going down to the Gulf region during spring break and summer vacations and working on the oil rigs, and they were making good money.

Of course, they’d come back and tell stories about what they were making, and my son thought that sounded very good. So when he graduated he wanted to go down and work for the summer and then come back in and go to school.

Well he was down there about two months and he called me and said, ’you know, I like it down here. I think I’d like to go to school here.’ And so he got on the oil rigs and worked for quite a while. I’ve forgotten how many years.

But he met a girl he proposed to and she accepted and they were going to be making plans. They’d been engaged for about two and a half years and then they broke up. And she complained that when you work on the oil rigs you are offshore for seven days and onshore for seven days.

And the schools down there worked with them to go, and he was going to school - if he had completed that he would have had three degrees in petroleum services.

But she complained that there they were engaged but he was offshore and he was gone seven days. Well. She knew that before she accepted the proposal. But, you know, those things happen. So they split. He is now supervisor in a riverboat casino and seems to enjoy it quite a lot.

So I called and I said you’re down there and I would like to - since I didn’t go into mission work I’d like to go into convent. He said, ’you’ve always wanted to do that. Go ahead.’

So he came back and helped me put everything in storage, and I went to Buffalo, New York to an Episcopal convent called Community in the Way of the Cross. I was there for four and a quarter years. You know, God works in mysterious ways and there was a time that I needed to be there. I learned a lot of things.

Well then there came a time when I needed to leave the convent, and I did. I was ready for a senior profession when I left. You know, these last few years the Episcopal Church has ordained or is ordaining homosexual people and I could never have handled that. I think that my coming out of the convent and came out at a time - I didn’t know why, you know, it’s a total disruption in your plans, and since that I look back on it and I think that’s probably the reason why. I couldn’t have accepted that.

No. They hadn’t done that prior to that. It was after I came out of the convent when this begun happening. At that time it was a big thing. We had a couple of female priests, and that was a big thing that they would have female priests, and see then the other came after that.

So, you know, female priests - I got along all right with that. But when it came to the other, I just think scripture if very much against that. You know. I couldn’t have accepted it.

I went first to my son’s and stayed down there for a couple of months. I had a friend that lived in California and she called and said she would give me a round-trip ticket to California for my birthday that year if I would come out.

She said, ’think over what you are going to do now.’

And so I went out in July and went out expecting to stay for three weeks, and I stayed for nine years.

I got a job working for the Veterans’ Affairs from Palo Alto. I worked through that, and stayed nine years. Then my father was ill and in a nursing home, and they said he could come out of the nursing home if there were somebody here to do his meals and give him insulin. He’d had a stroke and it had affected pancreas and it didn’t produce insulin properly anymore.

Our brother is a year and a half older than I, our sister is 20 years four months and four days younger than I, and there are nine between us.

Well she and her husband were still working, so they couldn’t very easily take care of dad at home and working. But I was at an age that I could retire. So I retired from Veterans’ Affairs after working for them for nine years and come back to Ohio to help take care of dad.

Then of course when he had another stroke and had to go back into the nursing home, there I was with nothing to do, retired. So I heard about this school in Columbus.

I wanted to get into herbology and I started talking to a woman that was involved in that and she said, ’you may be interested in meeting a friend of mine and she does a little herbology and she also does reflexology’ and she had horses and dealt with the equine healing.

So she introduced me to her and she told me about the school in Columbus and I went there and got my certification for reflexology and I’ve been doing that now for I guess about 11 years or a little more.

It’s something that I was interested in and it’s helping people. I work by appointment; sometimes I go to people’s homes and sometimes they come here. I’m here two days a week. I go to, they have a retirement home for women here in town, I go there twice a month and whoever wants to have their feet worked on that day - yesterday was my day to do that.

Reflexology? You can tell by the tender places when we put pressure - I put about 20 pounds of pressure with my thumbs and fingers on people’s feet, and you can tell where, like if the kidney area is tender they evidently have a kidney problem. If the chest area, they probably have bronchitis or pleurisy or even emphysema or asthma. If the adrenal gland area is tender - and all of the various things. It’s like a map on your foot.

I should have brought the case in that has pictures in it. You can tell where something hurts as to what’s wrong.

I had one lady that the kidney area and bladder area were tender.

And I said, ’do you have a problem with that?’

’Oh, no’, she said, ’I’ve been to the doctor and he says everything’s okay.’

Well, she came in for a while every week and all of a sudden she didn’t come. She cancelled out; for about three weeks she was gone.

And she came back and she said, ’I just got out of the hospital’.

I said, ’what were you there for?’

She said, ’I had a kidney infection’, and she said ’had I gone to the doctor and asked about that when you first told me, I probably could have avoided going to the hospital.’

I had another lady and they were planning a trip to Las Vegas. And of course, if you have an ear infection, you shouldn’t be flying. And I said, ’Maryanne, your ear area is very tender and I think you probably have an ear infection.’ Well, see we’re not allowed to diagnose or prescribe.

So, ’oh’, she said, ’I’m fine, I’m fine.’

So they went to Las Vegas. When she came back, again, she didn’t come in for a little bit. And when she came in, she said, ’you know, you were right. I had quite an ear infection.’ ’I have medication for an ear infection.’

So, you know things like that. There are little things that - medical doctors don’t agree with this sort of thing - but there are little things that you can do that doesn’t cost anything and you can avoid a big fee.

This area of the country is big on sinus problems and thyroid problems. Well, if you do this the lymphatic system has pressure points around your wrists and around your ankles.

Our instructor told us that if we made circles with our ankles for 20 minutes every day, we would get up with a clear head. Well, I always got bronchitis and things like that in the winter and I was taking classes in the winter and was having a big case of bronchitis, and so I started doing it and you know that cleared up.

When your sinuses drain, it goes down into your bronchial tubes, and so she said 20 minutes. Well you know that’s a long time and it made these muscles in the calf of my leg get so tired, and I do one ankle and then the other, and when I looked at the charts and saw that the same area is around your wrists,

I thought that gives me four areas to do. So I could do a hundred circles with one ankle, a hundred with the other one, a hundred with the wrist and a hundred with the other. But by that time the first one would be rested enough and I could start over again, and get my 20 minutes in.

And if you do it regularly, you don’t have that congestion and so on. And I find that in a textbook that was talking about emphysema. If you use castor oil pack on your chest, that will also help that. Castor oil is good for any kind of congestion. This is what my son thought that I should be putting on now.

Little things like that that are hints for people that would keep them from having to pay huge doctor bills. A lot of people have cold feet and they’ll say, ’oh my feet are so cold’, especially this time of year. Well if you take your shoe and get some red pepper and put just a tiny little bit of red pepper down in your shoe, you put too much in you’ll get a lump under your foot from perspiration, but just a tiny little bit and then you have your sock between your foot and the shoe, but your foot will get warm and stay warm all day. I do it every morning.