Gwen Hobgood is in love. I could see it in her smile.

I sat down with Gwen on a sunny May afternoon in her South Yarmouth home. Upon entering the doorway, it’s obvious you are in artist territory. Her paintings line the walls, deep rich colors of the southwest. Her students enjoy private lessons in her brightly lit sun room. A manuscript of her poetry sits on the coffee table, her partner, John, showing it off with pride. They beamed at each other.

One might wonder, how did she get to here from…there?  Hobgood, 77, has not always felt love so easily.

Her gray hair in a pony-tail, paint stained jeans from her latest project, curled up comfortably on her antique sofa, she reminisced. Taking us back to rural southern America in the 1940s, she described life as an impoverished child of a schizophrenic mother and an alcoholic father, both migrant workers. The family traveled from state to state, following the crops and railroads. This took them from Kentucky, through Alabama, Arkansas and Texas. Gwen learned to farm. “Everything we planted seemed to grow. I was good at it.”  Work, however, was not consistent, and her home environment was more than unstable. They actually had no official “home.” They were “squatters”…seeking out abandoned homes, barns, sheds- and even boats- to inhabit. Her mother’s mental illness and her father’s substance abuse was a recipe for disaster. After vicious arguments, they would often abandon their children, leaving her and her older brother to fend for themselves. Fear was constant. “I was always alert for anything to happen…mom and dad could end up in a fight…it could be weeks before either one of them came back. And Buddy and I just carried on our lives, like they were coming home at dinner time.” Gwen was nervously rolling a napkin between her fingers as she recalled the anxiety of living in such a traumatic environment, though a smile crept across her face as she talked about the amazing problem-solving techniques of 8-year-old Gwen. “I got really good at the shotgun, really good with the rifle and really good with the slingshot. I’d go out and get my meal.” Resiliency at its finest.

Throughout the years, she became a statistic… poverty, bullying, sexual abuse. She found solace in an unexpected place: the swampy wetlands. “I was hiding. Sometimes from the imaginary people my mother thought were after us, and other times I was hiding from people I didn’t want to be around. Like my Uncle. I’d take off and go in the swamp area where he couldn’t get to me. He was too big and too heavy and he would sink in, but I could run right across it. It was a protective area for me.” She describes her younger self as scared. “She was always alert. She was like a little birdie that would go ahead and eat the grains, but will be looking all the time for snakes, spiders, rats…and people. Most of all, people.”

She tells me the hardest part of growing up was not the neglect or abuse, but trying to blend in with her community when they would go into town. “In town, everything was perfect. But outside of town, out past the crops…near the woods, near the swamps…it was poverty. But we didn’t know it. We didn’t know it until we came into town…I was so used to being by myself… I didn’t know how to talk with them. I didn’t know what to say. And I sure didn’t fit in. I looked like a wild child, because I had been a wild child. And I had nothing. I didn’t even get my first pair of underwear until I was 11 years old. I wore my brother’s big baggy overalls all the time…all the other little girls had pretty little patent leather shoes and lace on their stockings and little dresses and were cute. I’d never had a dress in my life.” Lying in her handmade hammock, she dreamed of having a house. She began writing poetry around the age of ten, a cathartic release for her emotions and dreams. Gwen Hobgood is living proof that limited resources does not impede creativity and intelligence.

Frequent moves, her family’s dysfunctional dynamic and the need for income resulted in Gwen dropping out of school two weeks into 8^th grade. They settled in Denver to help her aunt raise her eleven children. Gwen, now 14, took on the role of mother to cousins she had never met before, while her aunt and mother worked. Her dad had taken off by then. She went from having a skeleton of a family unit to feeling overwhelmed with her newly assigned role. “I was frantic…I didn’t know what to do. I was overloaded…I was lonesome for the swamps. I wanted so badly to leave Denver and go back to the swamps.” At the age of 18, Gwen eventually got a job outside the home to contribute towards paying the bills. “I was working at a Chinese restaurant in North Denver and these guys kept coming in every weekend and they had on military gear and they were just full of fun and full of the devil…they were skydivers.” She credits meeting these men with opening her eyes to life outside serving her family. She started skydiving and was instantly hooked. “They didn’t realize it was my first time in an airplane…it was the freest I’d ever felt in my life. From inside out, every fiber of my being was alive. It was electric.” She described the first seconds of free-falling as “washing away a lifetime. And from that point on, I really knew what excitement and life and taking your next breath really meant. That made a huge impact on me.” She states skydiving gave her the confidence to say “no” and take time for herself. She ended up getting her own apartment, finally breaking free from her childhood role as caregiver. Unfortunately, this freedom was short lived. She came home from work one snowy day to find her entire extended family, along with their boxed belongings, crowded into her apartment. “As I went in to the bedroom, there were five or six kids in the bed sleeping. I go into the bathroom and there’s a couple of kids in the bathtub sleeping…I was devastated.” Distraught, she fled her apartment into the winter snow. “I didn’t even get in my car. I forgot I had a car, I just took off walking. I was crying and I was mad and I was just totally frustrated. I walked all the way to downtown Denver in the snow…I suddenly realize that I can’t feel my legs from the knees down, because I’m that cold. There was this little alcove…a storefront…I got in there to get out of the wind and there was this sign that says ‘Uncle Sam Wants You’ and I’m looking at that and the guy opens the door and says ‘you want to come in and get warm?’…I rolled right into the recruiting station.” Before she knew it, she was signing up. She earned her GED that day. Remember, limited resources does not impede creativity and intelligence.

Determined to feel freedom again, she hid her enlistment from her mother until the day before she left for boot camp. Her mother cried and tried talking her out of it, but the decision had been made. “I knew they couldn’t follow me. The Army wouldn’t let them in,” she chuckled. Gwen describes arriving at Fort McClellan, Alabama. “It was the best Christmas I’d ever had in my entire life. There was one other girl there. I had a room with 40 bunks in it all to myself except for one other person. I got this one, and she got the one way down there, because she came from much the same thing I’d come from. She had her space and I had my space and we had it all through Christmas and it was Heaven! I didn’t have to take care of any babies, I didn’t have to do any laundry, I didn’t have to settle any fights, I didn’t have to do any of the motherly stuff I always had to do. I was just in Heaven…I had planned to stay forever.”

True to form, life had other plans for Gwen. She ended up leaving the army due to pregnancy and marriage, settling in Massachusetts to raise her three children. Divorce followed, almost 20 years later. She spent middle age running her upholstery business, learning to paint, and always continuing to write poetry. Despite life’s struggles, she was committed to finding ways to embrace her sense of self. She was able to give herself the love she always needed. Quite an accomplishment. The Universe responded appropriately… love found Gwen at the age of 55, in the form of retired Air Force Vietnam veteran, Larry Hobgood. Their romance lasted almost twenty years, until he passed away after a seven year battle with cancer. Cancer has that sinister way of taking its toll on relationships, but their love was there until the very end. “Before he died, he told me that his door was closing, but my door was opening up. I should walk through it bravely and find somebody to love.” Fatigued, Gwen painted and wrote her way through her grief. It’s been two years now. “I’ve got three different books I’ve been writing in, painting up a storm and building in my house the way I want it to be,” she says. “I was reading through one of my stories today and it brought back tears. It was deeply moving. It’s like therapy. The best therapy in the world, even going back to read it again. It hurts less and less each time I read it, and makes me feel like I should be doing exactly what I’m doing.” And by that, Gwen means being in love. Being happy. Finding joy in everyday things. “I’ve got a man that I love, and he loves me right back”. Her partner, John, is helping her with the monumental task of pulling together all of her poetry, creating her life story. She is sincere as she states, “It makes me cry when I read it.”

Remembering her associating the word “fear” with 8-year-old Gwen, I wonder how she feels at this stage in her life. She grins, looking out the window. “Like standing on a nice, big, warm rock, looking out over the ocean and just breathing it in…I feel peaceful. I feel exhilaration. I feel love. I feel like I could breathe in the whole world.” Her response amazes me. I ask how it’s possible for anyone to have those feelings, after describing the life circumstances she’s been through. I wonder where the anger is. ‘”I’ve learned to let go. I’ve learned to let go of the pain. I recognize the pain. And sometimes, it will come back and bite me in the butt a little bit, but then I know where it needs to go. It’s not that I’m burying it. I file it away because I don’t need it now. There was many times when I needed that, to keep me going. But I don’t need it now. I’ve just got it sitting over in the corner, and if it wants to come back, I’ll acknowledge it for a little bit. But not for very long.” I shake my head in awe, asking her “And it’s easy for you to just open your heart up to love?” She lets out a hearty laugh, with the wisdom one only possesses after living a life like hers. “Oh my God…it is SO easy! The closeness we have…first thing when you wake up in the morning, there’s a smile. Every time we see each other, we both light up. Every time we go any place, and hold hands…it’s not that we need each other…it’s that we have each other, and we know it. I’m not worried about anything with him, and he’s not worried about anything with me. And we’re building our relationship every day. We talk about everything. Nothing is off the table. And if something’s bothering either one of us, the subject is brought up and we discuss it and work it out, investigate why it happened and maybe realize it’s something that happened a long time ago that provoked the feelings that we’re having. Most of the time, it’s not even about us, it’s about something else entirely.” Wisdom. Resiliency.

I thought about what Gwen would say to her 8-year-old self, hiding in the swamp, running away. I asked what she thought that girl might need to hear. She paused for a moment. “I think I would tell her don’t worry. It’ll come to you. Everything will come to you, because it does…it has. I get sad for her. I do cry for her.” Her voice quivers in a faint whisper, “But she’s so strong.” She blots her eyes with the worn napkin. “I think about her a lot. Especially lately, since we’ve been working on the poems…it’s very therapeutic. When I write my poems, it explores all the feelings that I can remember and it’s very cathartic. Actually, writing the poetry and putting them together with John has been monumental to me. And when I paint, that does the same thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a boat or a flower. It’s the process of putting my emotions on the paper or the canvas.” She and John show me her collection of poems, his arm around her shoulders. Her current painting sits on an easel in the corner…a sunken boat illuminated by the sunrise. Yes, today’s Gwen is safe. She embodies love, and she defines resiliency. Her words define her best, “No fear. I’ll tackle anything.”

No doubt, Gwen. No doubt.