Stories for My Kids

First-time writer, but lifelong storyteller, Ileen Dunivent works through her grief by facing it head-on. After losing her partner of 73 years, she answers the question all her friends and family ask: “What are you going to do?” with the response: “I’m writing a book.” Stories for My Kids published 14 months later. She wrote it for her children and their children, but also for herself. Putting thoughts to paper – yes, she wrote it longhand on lined notepaper – helped her see the fullness of her life more clearly. And to be filled with gratitude.    She shares her wisdom in these pages and also her joy. You don’t have to be related to appreciate what Ileen’s accomplished in writing this book. She takes you along on her journey – irrepressible tomboy, polio-stricken child, head-in-the-clouds artist, lovesick teen, struggling mother, sledgehammer-wielding wife, faithful caretaker. Prepare for a sweet ride, and when done, to feel like you’re family. Excerpt I look in the mirror and barely recognize the wrinkled lady looking back at me. Funny, isn’t it? Your body goes through all these transformations. Long, skinny, adolescent limbs. Rounding into the graceful shapes of womanhood. Big bellies bearing babies. Strong backs that carry children, groceries and garden bounty. Scars crisscross my knees and hips and abdomen now, signs of replaced joints and doctors’ explorations. I hurt more often than I don’t. And, yet, I’m not this body. I still feel like scrappy, scrawny little Ileen. The always-in-motion tomboy. Finding adventure. Or creating it. Stories of my youth replay in an endless reel. Forgotten details bubble up, surprising and delighting me. I would like to share them with you. Let me tell you how it was for me, for Ileen, a Rocky Mountain girl. … Mostly they’re of my WWII-era, Colorado childhood. Climbing trees. Having adventures with Beverly, a freckle-faced aunt just a little older than me. Riding the streetcar to movies in downtown Denver, money pinned to my Shirley Temple-style dress. Hunting for treasure alongside hobos at the Aurora dump. Tormenting and evading the mean old lady next door. Selling victory garden fruits and vegetables from my red wagon. Discovering the overall-wearing neighbor “Bill” was actually a woman with a husband. Enduring brutal polio therapies and lonely, quarantined weeks in a hospital away from my parents and little brother. Loving on my dollies even though I was a diehard tomboy. I have other stories, too; equally precious ones I’d like my family to know. I talk about our travels, especially the insurance conventions to swanky places like San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado or Mackinac Island’s Grand Hotel. There were overseas trips, too. You would get tipsy if you made a drinking game out of the times I namedrop Switzerland. Sorry about that, but I grew up on Heidi, so breathing her alpine air was a fairytale come true.