Hi, my name is Segwyne and I am putting my biography here online with my chart for astrology students.
I was born March 26th, 1976 in Stoneham, Massachusetts at 10:48 am. Or so I believe. My mom studied astrology when I was young and she kept saying that my birth time was 10:52, but then I found one of her charts for me that said 10:48. So I started using that one instead. I have since rectified it to 10:47 am.
My mom was a librarian and quit her job when I was born. She did not return to the work force until I went to college. My dad was all kinds of things. He had more jobs than I can count. He usually did shift work as a 3rd class steam engineer in factories.
I have two younger brothers, with whom I had an off-on relationship with. We fought constantly when we were young. Now that we are grown, I get along with the older one, but the younger one and I still fight frequently.
When I was small, we lived in Everett, Mass until August 1980. Our apartment was the second and third floors of a house on a dead end street. Our address was 8 Belmont Park, Everett, MA. My parents made me learn it when I was young. They taught me my phone number, too, but I no longer remember it (hey, it was 27 years ago).
I remember all of my friends from then, and the games we played and even parts of my friends� houses. I remember my babysitters, Becky and Mike. Mike was missing his left ring finger due to a factory accident. I stayed with them while my mom attended astrology classes. Mike had a short beard that I called his "pickies". I really liked them.
My dad got a dog for security at his shop (I think that was the watch repair shop, where I burned my favorite blanket on the heater), and she was a German Shepherd named Tasha. Tasha didn�t like me, so they took her back and got a red Doberman named Rusty. Rusty still had his ears, so he wasn�t mean tempered. I loved that dog dearly.
I learned to read at the age of three or four. My first word was "book", and my favorite bedtime story was The Poky Little Puppy. Thus was born a bibliophile, and a child with too much education.
My first broken bone was at the age of 2. I clearly remember it. I was jumping on my parents� bed and my mom was still in it. I decided to jump over her, but there was no bed there when I came down. I landed on the floor (I remember it being a doorframe, but Mom says it was a night stand or dresser or something) and broke my right clavicle (collar bone). I remember looking out the car window on the trip to the doctor, but I don�t remember the visit itself. I had to have a lot of straps wrapped around my body until it healed and I remember sitting on the counter wearing it watching my mom bake cookies.
When I was four and a half in August, we moved to Deering, New Hampshire. My parents had bought a piece of land there when I was 2, and we were going to build a house. My dad still worked in Brockton, MA, so he stayed down there during the week, while my mom, my brother Doug and I lived in a construction trailer in Deering. Dad would come home on weekends, which at that age I thought were Monday and Tuesday, since those were his days off. I made a few friends and spent a lot of time outside exploring the woods.
A few months later (I don�t remember the date, but it was before Christmas) we moved into a 3 room cottage in the next town over (Red Fox Crossing in Hillsboro). My other brother Andy was born there when I was 5 and a half. Doug and I stayed for a few days with my dad�s friend Bill Amsler and his girlfriend Debbie, then went to my aunt�s for the remainder of the week. I remember the layout of that house, there was only one bedroom, and we kids shared it. Except Andy. He got to stay up late and sleep with Mom and Dad. Boy, was I jealous. We watched Pac-Man on Saturday mornings and played outside a lot.
It was about that time that my mom became Christian. We had had no religion in our lives until then that I remember. She started attending the Methodist church in town and we started Sunday School. I was baptized at the age of 5, at my own request. It happened at a church retreat called Camp Berea, and I wore a Winnie the Pooh swimsuit.
I started kindergarten then. My mom took me to enroll me at a private Christian school and they wanted to assess my reading skills. They gave me a book about eggs, and I thought it was so stupid. Happy Egg. Sad Egg. Round Egg. It was so below me. I had been given Francis Hodgeson Burnett�s The Secret Garden for my 5th birthday. I wasn't interested in eggs with faces! I spent the first half of my days with the kindergarten class learning things like finger counting. Actually, that�s pretty much all I remember of my kindergarten mornings. I learned a few years ago that it is called Chisenbop counting, or some such as that. After lunch I went into the grade school classroom and did my 1st grade work. When I was formally in 1st grade, I had already done all that work, so I did my 2nd grade work there. They decided to stop fooling around and make my grade jump official.
That year, we moved again, to another cottage just a mile or so from the first (Gould Pond Road). It was in the same settlement, so not a lot changed. The Red Fox Crossing house had gotten ice damage, I believe, which is why we moved this time. Again, it was a three room house, and we got the bedroom. I taught Andy how to walk there by standing him up in front of the TV and encouraging him to walk to me as I sat on the floor in front of the couch. I watched a lot of Sesame Street, Mr. Roger�s Neighborhood, Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact on PBS. I was allowed to walk around the lake to my friend�s house by myself, and I find it amazing that I could do that, because it must have been a mile or more. I wouldn�t let my 8 year old walk that far by herself, but then again, we live in town now, as opposed to an isolated lake settlement.
Mom says Andy was 18 months old when we moved to Lovewell Mountain in Washington, NH. That would have made it February of 1983. I was almost 7. I continued going to the Christian School, but the next year my mom started homeschooling me. They impressed upon me that the public schools were the place of the devil and I would be corrupted and eaten alive if I went to school there, but they couldn�t afford the private school anymore. The day before my 7th birthday one of our dogs (not Rusty) ate my teddy bear. I was devastated. That doesn�t make sense, unless we got two dogs between the time we moved up there and my birthday the next month. We only had one dog when we moved up there, but it was our third dog, Pepper, who ate Faithful, my bear. There was a family across the road from us who had children just our ages, so although we lived � mile up the side of a mountain with no public road for a mile, we still had playmates. It was their daughter, my friend Jenny who was 4 months younger than I, who taught me to ride a bicycle. I missed her birthday party because I had chicken pox and her mom had never had it and didn't want it over there. We spent a couple of years up there and I loved it. We had no running water, so we got water from the creek in the summer. In the winter, we melted snow. One of those summers, we had four teenagers from Wheaton College in Illinois spend a couple of weeks with us as part of some program. One of the girls was named Dreama.
While we lived there Rusty came down with heartworms. We couldn�t afford to take him to a vet regularly, so when we found out, it was too late to save him. My parents tried, but the medicine was just too little, too late. I remember my dad said he was going hunting with Rusty one day, and Dad came back, but Rusty didn�t. I think that was my first real taste of grief. I had said goodbye to many friends each time we moved, but Rusty was family, and I would never be able to play with him again.
We started building a house on the property in Deering when my parents' purchase of the house on the mountain fell through. They built it with their own hands. They had a cement company pour the slab, but the rest of it was all them. I admire their determination to do it themselves. They started building the garage first, since it was going to be smaller, thus finished first, so we could move in and they could start building the house proper. Before it was finished, we had to move off of the mountain and into a friend�s camping lodge. It was also three rooms, and pretty small. It had no heat, being only a seasonal place, and of course we were there for the winter. We lived in the kitchen that year with a propane space heater. We were right on the highway and lost many kittens to traffic. At that point, we had two mother cats, all their kittens, and Pepper (the dog who ate Faithful). It was there that my bunny died, too. Her name was Bunnifer and I had gotten her for my birthday one year on the mountain. She was a white rabbit, with stand up ears and pink eyes. Christmas Eve (1984) I went outside to feed her in her hutch and found her lying on the floor. Now, rabbits don't lie down on their sides, and I knew something was wrong. I took her out of the hutch and brought her in the house. My mom put the dog outside and we tried to figure out what was wrong with her. She kept squealing, but not moving, and finally I decided that she had had enough pain. As before with Rusty, we couldn't take her to a vet, so when Dad came home early that afternoon, I said my goodbyes to her and asked him to please put her out of her misery. He asked me if I was sure, then sadly took down his .22 rifle. He commended me on my strength and took her outside so I wouldn't have to see.
In January of 1985 we moved into the garage in Deering. It was all open concept (as if a garage could be anything else), and we had a loft upstairs that we all shared. I screened off some area for myself with a blanket so I could have my own "room". That space was 8�x8�x8�. That was the first presidential election I remember. It was Reagan vs. Mondale. I seem to recall Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson also in the running. This is the place I usually refer to when I refer to a childhood home. The next summer, when I was nine, we acquired two female goats (does, not nanny goats). We bred them that fall, and in the spring they gave birth to two sets of twins. Three were does and one was a buck. My 10th birthday party was planned for April 3 that year at Chuck E. Cheese�s, but my mom didn�t go because Mabel was due that day. I don�t know right now why we thought she couldn't give birth without us, but we did. Needless to say, she waited until the next Sunday (April 11) while we were at church to have her kids, Frisky and Jenny. Molly gave birth 7 days later to Star and Jimbo. I joined the local 4H chapter for Dairy Goats and showed them in fairs and won lots of ribbons. Within a couple of years we had about 25 goats and were slaughtering the bucks for meat. Mmmm! Goat burgers.
We had no electricity and no running water there. We got our water from neighbors or a well, and our TV ran off of a car battery. That�s how I saw the Challenger explode. I was very shocked. It was my first time watching a space shuttle take off, and one of the astronauts was a teacher from my home state of New Hampshire. Her name was Christa McAulliffe. There is now a planetarium in Concord named for her.
My dad was working 2nd shift (3pm to 11pm) in a plant in Concord, and we had a Friday routine. Since we had only one car (and I don't remember my parents ever having more than one car), we would all drive into Concord. We dropped Daddy off at work, then went to do the week's laundry. After that, we went grocery shopping, and I learned how to shop on a very tight budget. Next stop was McDonald's for take-out, and by that time all the bosses were gone from Dad's work, so we went back there and had supper with him. We were given showers in the emergency safety showers and thus we could be clean for Sunday morning church. We would then run around the plant and play until bedtime, when we went out and slept in the backseat of the car. I was always in the middle. My parents used me as a buffer between the boys, who used me as a pillow.
Later my dad started his own business (one of many attempts at self employment, boy do I know how that feels). He installed heating systems, and frequently Mom would go with him, leaving us home alone. At age 11, I was not a very good babysitter for my brothers, then 8 and 6. Once my parents caught me beating on them because they wouldn�t submit to my authority, and Dad called me a little Hitler. I hated babysitting them and was very bossy. They hated me, too. It took years for us to get over that. My brother Doug and I didn�t start getting along until I moved away to go to college.
This is also where we were living when my dear great grandmother passed away. She was 95 years old and was the first person I knew who died. My dad explained to us that it was okay that she died, because she had lived a long life and was having medical problems due to her age. I did not feel the need to grieve for her. I still have books she gave me, big beautiful picture books. One was "The Firebird and Other Russian Fairytales", and the other was "The Velveteen Rabbit". I treasure them still and read them to my children. That I think shaped my view on death. It is a fact of life, and just because we will miss someone doesn�t mean that it is a bad thing for them to die. Endings are not evil in and of themselves. Without death, there can be no rebirth.
Those were the happy times of my life. I remember them fondly, and have often sought to recapture them in my adult life. I can�t of course. There is something you lose as you grow up, the ability to live life in the here and now. I was well aware of my parents� financial situation. I understood perfectly when they couldn�t give me my $.50 allowance because they needed it for groceries, and never begrudged them. I knew we didn�t live as well as other kids in the area. But I had my mom and dad and they lived together and mom stayed home with me and they loved me. My friend who lived across the road there was a latchkey kid, and I could see the difference that made in our lives, even though I was only 11. Once, when I was about 13, there was a little girl about 5 or 6 with whom I was conversing. She asked me where I lived, then she asked me where my dad lived. Then she asked me where my mom lived. She did not believe that a mom and dad could live together. I was heartbroken.
