Esther Williams:  

Life I have 4 children, ages 32, 29, 18 & 16. 2 boys and 2 girls. I am an artist doing mostly oil paintings of landscapes, seascapes, still lifes & figural. My art is in a few galleries and is exhibited. I am married, been with him for 20 years and live in southern CA. I travel up to Napa once a year and go back to NY once every few years. I used to be part of a large family of 10 that lived in Binghamton, New York and then Napa, we were not wealthy but rather poor. We used to move every 2-3 years, I think we lived in 4 places in the 10 year stay from 1961-71. Even though financially it was very tough, I look back on those years in Napa as the best years of my life. I was six years old when we first landed in Napa from upstate New York. My dad taught me how to ride a bike then. He was very useful sometimes when he wasn't stone drunk. Which is also the reason we had to run out of the house everyday and find something to do outside, he was too drunk. My mother did most of the business to make money with vacuum cleaner repair. Then dad would sober up enough to make some Electrolux sales so we could eat and pay the rent, bills, buy food, etc... I was a great artist in each of my schools, it was the one thing I knew I excelled at and got the perfect grades on all the time, so I kept drawing and learning art. But I loved physical activities too. Napa was a treasure chest of beautiful nature and I would take off on my bike with a few siblings and we would ride all day. We would stop at Dry Creek Rd or Redwood Rd up in the hills to swim in the creeks for fun. We would look for deer tracks and spot them all over. Those are great memories. Sometimes we would run through the cow pastures and step in the dung and freak out or be chased by bulls, it was hilarious running for our lives. If a farmer spotted us, he would chase us from the field, we could run a lot faster until he used his truck the next time. One farmer pulled out a salt gun but he was a ba...Expand for more