Growing Tall in Colorado

Hannah Blue Heron's story of her childhood begins with the imagined thoughts of the infant in her mother's womb. Even though she is born with painfully twisted feet and a severe allergy to milk, Anna Georgette becomes a happy, busy child.

She, her railroader father, her amazingly understanding mother and her much older sister moved twelve times in as many years, but with her violin, her beloved bike, Cap'n Henry and her devotion to the Girl Scouts, Georgette was always busy organizing circuses, puppet shows, a sports club and a "kid's" newspaper. However, The future Hannah Blue Heron developed into a deeply caring person for the concerns of others. Her own pains, coming first with her father's retirement as the family "learned to be poor", and later, with the realization that high school boys disdained girls who were five feet ten inches tall. Blue Heron's detailed and straight forward manner of telling her story, makes her like a Depression-era Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Here is a childhood, that produced a professional violinist, a nun for seventeen years, a hippie, a member of the women's back-to-the-land movement, and a proud lesbian/feminist/Buddhist writer.