At some point, my mother left my dad. It started with a vacation to Montana – but she never came back. She didn’t tell him that she was leaving, and hadn’t talked to him. When she didn’t return, Dad started calling friends and family, but no one knew where she was or had heard from her.

On my birthday, Mom called me to ask if I had heard from my dad. I hadn’t spoken to him for some time and wasn’t aware of what was happening, and simply answered, “No”. Cassandra had spent the night with me, laughing about something, and Mom asked who it was. Just a girl I had met (and later became my wife).

Mom never called me on my birthday before, and the conversation was only about Dad. No birthday wishes or anything. Reflecting upon it later, it seems she was just trying to get information on what was going on.

I talked to Dad, and my brother and I visited him in Fort Ashby to get an idea of what was going on. He said he started noticing things were missing, and then she didn’t return. It was very alarming as we couldn’t figure out what was going on. Mom didn’t indicate that she was separating, divorcing, or upset with anything. She was simply gone. Without her closest friends acknowledging that they had been talking to her, it made it even more stressful my mom’s well-being. We started trying to make sense of anything that could be a clue about what was happening.

Eventually, we found out that someone who came through the fairgrounds was a glassblower. She had decided to live with him down in Florida.