Tossing To and Fro': The Coming of Age

by Victoria Farnsworth

A young teenage girl faces the challenges of a dysfunctional family, peer pressures, and finding herself. Her hopes and dreams are molded by the events taking place around her. Share in her first date, first kiss, and first cigarette. Experience the Seattle World's Fair, the Kennedy assassination, the Columbus Day Storm, and other events that shaped the author's life. Get a true glimpse of life during the early 1960s on Bainbridge Island in the state of Washington and recall your own years in junior high school.

152 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 2014

About the author

Victoria Farnsworth was born in California but grew up on a beautiful island in the Pacific Northwest. She spent three years in California as a teenager but returned to the Pacific Northwest to graduate from high school. It was during her senior year that she met her husband and after his return from Viet Nam, they married. They have been married for 45 years and together have three married daughters and eight beautiful (and highly intelligent) grandchildren. Due to health reasons, Victoria has moved to Payson and is enjoying her retirement surrounded by the natural beauty of the mountains in central Arizona.

She had her first work published in the Reader’s Digest in August of 1983. She spent the next several years writing poems for family, friends, and church but never endeavoring to publish her work. She kept busy working as a secretary for the Department of the Navy for several years. She then spent the next 15 years teaching swimming and related aquatic classes for various school and park districts in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California.

During her years working outside the home, she was also busy raising a family of three girls. As is every mother, she was busy driving girls to lessons, sports, and church activities. She had to deal with teenage boys, lovesick girls, and being married to a millworker turned truck driver.

When the girls all left home for school or marriage, rather than feel like an empty nester, she spent time in serious prayer and contemplation. She then embarked on a new career path and became Clara the Clown. Seven years were spent clowning around up and down the West Coast. As always, she was busy with church service and managed to be a Relief Society President during this time. Her new career ended when a car accident forced her to retire. After becoming a Master Gardener she started a new business doing landscape design. Unfortunately, another car accident forced her to once again give up something she loved.

Writing continued to be a hobby. During her 10 year membership in the Glove & Trowel Garden Club, she spent 4 years as secretary and writing the quarterly update of the club’s activities. In June of 2011 Victoria had an article published in the Northwest Landscape Professional magazine about butterfly gardening. So many people read the article and commented that she should write professionally; a seed was planted! She kept an online journal of her life in Mexico and continues with a website devoted to her new life and home in Payson, Arizona: http://victoriafarnsworth.weebly.com/.

As time has passed, Victoria has received more opportunities to relate stories from her life. Each time, people comment that she should write a book. Now, in her retirement, the time has come to share her life experiences. One book could not begin to hold 60 plus years of unforgettable events; hence this work will take many volumes to tell the story of an ordinary woman living an extraordinary life.