About Jean Anderson

I grew up on a ranch bordering the tiny town of Grass Valley, Oregon.  I was not a dainty girl. I was a breakneck kid, a trait that has permeated my entire life.  Having narrowly survived childhood, adolescence, marriage, children, divorce, I went back to school in my thirties and fulfilled an early dream by getting a degree in architecture.  This combination, plus a second marriage to an artist/adventurer/sailor led to an interesting life.

Over the years, I have written a collection of over 260 autobiographical vignettes progressing from early childhood through my sixties.  I’m calling this collection MY LIFE FROM Z TO A, having started with the name of Zevely and ended as Anderson.  These tales include the story of my famous racehorse ancestor Zev, the epic of giving my husband a whole stuffed moose for his birthday, the clandestine alteration of an interstate highway billboard, and an attempt to write a starling (as in bird) cook book.  There are accounts of unusual kinds of therapy and of starting a UFO research group (you may think one of these is the result of the other), and of the fiascos and successes remodeling the houses in which I have lived.Because blog posts have to be dated, and I wanted these entries to be read in historical sequence, they are dated in reverse order of their posting.  The first vignette of this memoir is the story “Ancestors (A Racy Story)” and they follow in order by reverse date.

Photos: The ranch at Grass Valley and me at age 46.