Aquinas College Archives Blog

  As cliche as it sounds, COVID-19 changed my life completely. From watching Outer Banks on Netflix and becoming my home’s personal barista to doing brand deals in front of 2.6 million people with Target and Walmart, it is safe to say my life a year ago was much different. During quarantine, I was depressed, in a funk, and very much not happy with my senior year. I was totally having a pity party (like the rest of the Class of 2020), but for some reason, I decided that my sadness would be cured if I chose to redo a shed in my backyard. You may be thinking, “Did this girl just say a shed?” and “What does she mean by redo?”. Well, I come from a long line of DIYers, “do it yourself-ers”, and with an exorbitant amount of time on my hands and an ugly shed at my disposal, I figured there was no better time to renovate it.   It’s hard for me to recall the moment in which I made the decision to film the process of creating my “She Shed,” but all I know is that I did it. The app called “TikTok”

  I grew up on a Michigan farm, the last of twelve children.  We were not poor, but we lived off what we produced from a yearly harvest.  My aunt married a Detroit businessman, who had a more lavish lifestyle.  Once a year she visited my mother and the conversations turned to politics.   She was Republican and my parents were all for Delano Roosevelt, who helped farmers around us keep their land from falling into debt.  At a young age, I was not interested in politics, so I was happy when she returned to the city and our home was peaceful again.  President Roosevelt's policies surely  influenced my future voting choices.   I graduated at age seventeen and entered Central Michigan College.  Since the voting age was twenty-one at that time, my first presidential vote was for John F. Kennedy when I was in my third year of teaching high school at Catholic Central in Alpena. The first Irish Catholic to be elected president, the young Kennedy filled me with hope for a better America. Tra