Fireflies at Twilight (Adams)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 20, 1951
• Rasied—Footville, Wisconsin, USA
• Death—March 14, 2011
• Where—New Glarus, Wisconsin
• Education—University of Wisconsn-Madison

Patsy Ann Adams was born in 1951 in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and grew up in Footville, Wisconsin, where she attended Orfordville's Parkview High School. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was employed at the New Glarus Elementary School near her rural home for 14 years.

Pat worked with special needs children in the New Glarus school system, starting as an aide to one young boy whom she accompanied all day. She went on to help with special needs children in mainstream and special education classrooms.

Pat loved her home on her husband’s family’s working dairy farm. A lover of all living things, she raised her own pigs, poultry, and vegetables, as well as flowers, dogs, cats, and kids—her own and others. "Half the kids in town knew her as 'Mama Pat,'" says her daughter Cate. She kept her four children—Sam, Cate, Norah, and Dan—involved in after-school activities from sports to music lessons, and attended every concert, recital and sports event.

Pat was an active community member and activist. She became a Girl Scout leader when her oldest daughter Cate joined in third grade and for fifteen years led the New Glarus area Girl Scouts, until her younger daughter Norah graduated from high school. Pat became involved in the teachers' union as her school’s representative for a number of years and served as the union’s president.

Pat always loved travel, including yearly summer vacations at a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which typically included an assortment of visiting family, friends, and pets, and trips that took her farther afield, including Ecuador and California.

Through her letters and emails, Pat kept in touch with family and friends near and far throughout the hectic family years and the more peaceful "empty nest" stage that preceded her death in March 2011.