Jeanine Collins Malarsky was born on the shores of Cayuga Lake in upstate New York in 1944. By the time she graduated twelfth grade her family had moved eighteen times. In 1951 as a six-year-old Yankee from New York, she found a new life on the Mississippi Delta. Three schools and three years later her family moved on to Ohio and then West Virginia where she left home at the age of fourteen when life offered an opportunity to change her fate. In 1962 she took a bus to New England to attend college, later meeting her husband and settling near Boston.
