75: a number a passage a presentBy: Audrey WardIllustrations by Olivia DucharmeAdventures in aging are not for the faint of heart, as author Audrey Ward discovers in these pages. When the apartment she planned to occupy upon retirement proves to be unreasonable, she stashes her downsized belongings and heads off to Europe, packing little more than the accumulated mettle of her seventy-five years.Ms. Ward spends her rent on buses, trains, and planes from Austria to the Czech Republic, over to the Swiss Alps, then Italy, Ireland, and the French Mediterranean, ending up in a Paris apartment for two months. Along the way, she meets up with friends and is often reminded of the vagabond life of her Appalachian childhood and of living in the Provençal region of France when her children were young.The illustrations included are line drawings by her fifteen-year-old granddaughter Olivia, who, along with her brother Will, seventeen, traveled with their grandmother for the first two weeks of the expedition.A lot of people have said they envied Audrey Ward taking such a trip; others frowned, incredulous. Still, others surmised that she was losing her mind to attempt such a passage on her own.The reader can decide independently.About the AuthorAudrey Ward taught middle school and high school while rearing two daughters, Tamara and Julie and a son, Sam. After attaining a Masters in Divinity at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, she served as pastor for over thirty years in the United Methodist Church, Northern California. During that time she specialized in child protection; writing the column "Regarding Children" for six years, weekly, for a number of newspapers. She is currently living in the Napa Valley where she is producing the column again as well as spending as much time as possible with six grandchildren, Lauren, Will, Olivia, Roselie, Yasmin and Zain.Ms. Ward is also the author of the memoir Hidden Biscuits, an account of her early life amongst Appalachian people in the Deep South.
