About Me

I’m a California girl through and through. I was raised in Laguna Beach a glorious place to grow up in and for which I will forever be grateful. I practiced law in California for 28 years. I’m fortunate that my career has afforded me the opportunity to teach, mentor, collaborate and write. I was in private practice in Bellflower before joining the Pasadena City Attorney’s Office as a criminal prosecutor. Subsequently I headed north to Butte and then Siskiyou counties. You can find me on http://www.calbar.ca.gov/ as Number 74352 (Inactive).

I love the beach and all things briny but a beach house was way beyond my adulthood means. Admittedly, I am a sea snob: if I can’t hear the waves as I go to sleep I’m not living at the beach! Suburbia is stifling and I need to gaze at open space which I found in the mountains and high valleys of California, north of Sacramento and San Francisco. When I’m not wet I like to hike and have fond memories of backpacking the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada mountain range as well as hitting the trail in the mountain ranges in southern California.

After several years as a Deputy District Attorney in Butte County, home to the communities of Oroville, Chico and Paradise, I migrated to Siskiyou County, the northernmost county in California, teeming with cows, horses, sheep and 44,301 souls (2000) spread over 6,347 square miles of land and water. I served as both a Deputy District Attorney and a Deputy Public Defender before becoming, once again, a private practitioner. Siskiyou is my heart and home, with its Gold Rush heritage, its rivers, mountains and valleys, its 60s commune (Black Bear Ranch) and its loyal activists promoting formation of a new state called the State of Jefferson. First proposed in 1941 to include the rural counties of norther California and southern Oregon, the movement lives on: in 2013 the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to secede from the State of California. 

Shortly before moving to Siskiyou County I married again and, for some enigmatic reason, this time I took my husband’s last name of “Stanhope.” Widowed in 1997, I have resumed using my birth name: Laura Gail Eagleton. I’m myself again!

In 2005 I retired from everything—including California—to live and study in Kenya. My time there was precious and much too short. You’ll have a chance to read all about the events that convinced me of the truth of this maxim: When I Make Plans, God Laughs. 

My next move was to the southeast United States to join my daughters and their families. This was planned as a short visit although it has metamorphosed into my perpetual state. After a joyous year living with a daughter and grandsons I moved to a campground in Fayetteville, North Carolina with Tawanda, my  22-foot travel trailer. I felt like a turtle with my home on my back! I was very happy there; it was a real campground (think critters, trees, ponds with no concrete or asphalt) and a community of full-timers in RVs, 5th wheels and pull-behinds that soon became family.  

My daughters graduated college, developed careers, had children and moved to the Washington D.C. area. After a stretch of unwelcome unemployment (an unlicensed in North Carolina attorney not being in high demand), I fortuitously became the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at Methodist University. I enjoyed the camaraderie and collegiality of the campus interspersed with visits to my grandchildren (and their parents).  I began thinking about my next twenty years and made a list of activities I enjoyed when I was a young, single, and childless.  

In 2012, against my better judgment (and to the sound of God laughing) I moved to Raleigh. Thanks to the perseverance and love of My Gentleman I’m a California ex pat in North Carolina,  Tawnada hanging out in our driveway . . .