Author Mary Finney
Email Mary HERE

I was born and lived in Seattle, Washington, but moved to a farm in Eastern Washington, where I started third grade at a small country school. Much of my childhood was in that rural environment living with my parents, my grandfather, and my two younger brothers and sister. The community in which we lived, which included a school and a church, was very nurturing.

We moved to Oregon prior to my high school graduation, as the farm was unable to produce the income needed to put four children through college. My father returned to the printing business and would have been delighted to examine Charlotte Finds a Home. After college and nursing school, my first job was caring for preschool-aged children at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon. After marrying my high-school classmate Gene Finney, we enjoyed family life in the Pacific Northwest. Later, due to his job, we moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where Charlotte Finds a Home took place. As an RN at The Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific, I remember staff potlucks where I ate various kinds of foods, including the Japanese dessert mochi. Enjoying the beauty of banyan trees, eating fresh papayas and pomelos, and learning words unique to the Hawaiian culture are part of my personal history.

St. Clements was my church home for nine years. I have fond memories of being a choir member, of church gatherings, and of riding on The Bus (yes, that is its name!). If you are lucky, you might see one decorated with a rainbow; Hawaii really is a land of many rainbows! The Director of the School told me of Charlotte and her three little kittens and how they had adopted the school as their home, and how the school adopted and cared for them in return.

We now live in the Pacific Northwest, where most of our family live, although Gene feels like he is “returning home” when he gets off a plane in Hawaii. We still use some of the words we learned, like “pau,” which means “finished, ended, all done,” which is where we are now on this page: PAU!