Share what you know about the year you were born.

It was in 1961, bitter cold in November. My mother, already in labor for 48 hours, lay on the damp dirt floor of the ill-kept cabin, fatigued from labor, wounded from the beating she received before her husband left her to die, deep in the woods of the upper peninsula of Michigan. Her sister, burst through the cabin door, fire and ice burning from her enraged glare. “Oh my God, that sonofabitch!” She tenderly wrapped my mother in a thin blanket and bundled her into a warm car. Racing to the hospital it would be nearly another 24 hours before I made my entrance into the world – ass backwards. Fully breached, I needed special attention from the doctors to be born. My mother spent the first day or so of my life in and out of consciousness. It’s a wonder I was named at all. I was supposed to be “Victoria” but apparently the person filling out the birth certificate didn’t know how to spell it, so I was named “Vicki” and I was given my maternal grandmother’s name “Marie” as my middle name. My mother put that part of her life behind her. She and I moved on to a new adventure that produced half sisters and a half brother. But that is another story.