Dear Ones,
My writing has kept me so busy, I never until today discovered there are 26 professional Helene Smiths listed. It has become confusing to the reader. Besides "Mame" I'm also listed with Jingleheimer in my name. One of my pen names is Erin King, on the book I wrote and designed. It tells about my husband's ancestor–Jedediah Strong Smith who also married an American Indian, the mother of one of his children, Jedediah After Smith. This famous explorer and mountain man who discovered mountain passes in the West has numerous historical sites named for him. My website is www.macdonaldsward.com–and I am happy to share with you all, free without charge, my lifetime poems, research, essays and experiences.
I have been an environmentalist ever since my childhood friend and I used to play down at Wolf Creek where we built a dock and a boat when we were 12 and also took care of erosion along the high bank that goes down to the creek. As children we filled gullies with sticks and stones to stop the flow and spread the water out among the trees and plant growth
Now that my friend and I have become re-aqcqainted after all these years, we are again as close as sisters. I wrote a novel for teens and young people and she edited it. The unpublished novel based on our golden hours of sunshine along the creek is called In The Shadow of the Old Bridge, a huge bridge still standing in Pennsylvania. There, we were female counterparts to Mark Twain's books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. We, with our husbands, later moved far away from our original home. She and I grew up reading Nancy Drew books and still have some from our collections. The book, In the Shadow of the Old Bridge, is a mystery–an adventure story of two youths that also involves a romance between one of them with a young man who rows a boat along a forest-bordered stream where she and her sister are living, hiding out after running away from their foster parents' home.
Mame
