Grace suddenly found herself a single parent in 1958, newly arrived and now alone in California with two young children. Even though we were struggling financially, she was determined that she would do her best to be both mother AND father to me and my brother. Not wanting us to be deprived of "normal" family activities, she decided the three of us would go camping for a week in Yosemite. We had no money to purchase camping equipment, but by a stroke of luck the previous tenant of our tiny apartment had left behind a big sack full of S&H Green Stamps in the storage closet. You have to be "of a certain age" to appreciate what a windfall this was, but you got Green Stamps as a bonus with grocery purchases, and after saving up enough of them they could be redeemed for items at a catalog store. But FIRST, you had to lick every darned one of them and stick them to the pages of these little coupon books. Do you have any idea how many stamps you had to lick and paste to earn a Coleman tent, lantern, and camp stove? I can remember the three of us sitting around the kitchen table licking what appeared to be thousands of stamps before Mom finally hit on the idea of employing a wet sponge instead of our gluey little tongues. We felt like millionaires when we finally marched into the redemption store with our bags of lumpy, sticky coupon books! We were so excited about our first camping trip, and so proud of our shiny new camping gear when we pulled into the campground at Yosemite. She was pretty nervous about camping alone with 2 little kids, but pulled off our big adventure without a hitch. It was her 40th birthday, and she spent it hiking with us to the top of Vernal Falls. 40 was not "the new 30" then, and she thought she was the oldest woman in the world to have made that hike!