I truly don’t feel any older than I did at graduation...BUT I do have a daughter who just turned forty so apparently SOME time must have elapsed!  But fifty years...incredible! 

I’m still working... for the City of Maple Grove as well as with my interior design clients... http://www.joannlowriedesign.com ...so I get to use both sides of my brain most of the time....except during my commute and our Minnesota snowstorms!   I’ve been to college twice; once at Mankato State and much later at the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture while Ralph Rapson was dean...a truly remarkable, amazing, transforming experience!  I was married to Tom Lowrie in 1963; had my beautiful daughter, Noelle, in 1970; and was happily divorced in 1984.  I’ve worked as an architect for Setter, Leach and Lindstrom in Minneapolis; an interior designer for a design center in Buffalo, Minnesota; a residential appraiser for the City of Plymouth; served as a member of the Minnesota Design Team for ten years and now am enjoying wildflower gardening, antiquing, playing piano, mini-scrapbooking for family, friends and General Mills, reading...mostly biographies, drawing house portraits, playing E and F part-time in an English handbell choir, researching my Swedish roots...and loving my granddog, ellie the chihuahua (who has her own website and is really a human trapped in a dog’s body, I’m sure!)   

I’m very blessed to still have my mom and aunt around...they will both be 94 on August 1st as they are identical twins (by birth but not by temperament, that’s for sure!)... as well as two sisters, a brother, two wonderful nieces and a nephew...plus a very talented nephew–in-law, Brian Applegate, who designs and fabricates Applegate guitars right out of his workshop in Chanhassen, Minnesota.  I still miss my dad, who died in 2003 at age 90 after a heart-breaking bout with cancer.  He was my hero, my true North, a man who impressed everyone who met him with his intelligence and humility, a WWII Army lieutenant colonel stationed on Bougainville Island in the South Pacific whose calm demeanor and desert-dry sense of humor reassured all 150 of the men in his company, the person who taught me how important it is to recognize and enjoy life’s simple blessings, and in his final days, the loving father who taught all of his children how to die with courage and dignity and simple surrender.  If I could change anything at all, it would be to have the monstrous disease that took his life wiped off the face of the earth forever...

I’m just so happy and content almost every single day...except during my commute and our Minnesota snowstorms!  I love everything that I do, love all the experiences...both good and bad...that I’ve been privileged to have had, love all the people in my life...looking forward to our 55th reunion to see if we will all start looking younger.  I’m sure that this aging thing shifts into reverse at some point...





P.S.  Women!!  Both my aunt and daughter complained about the NOW photo I first used...so to please them, I have changed it...it now INCLUDES my aunt and also WASN'T taken right after my daughter's tonsillectomy surgery...hope this makes them happy...