Valerie is the author of the acclaimed Tori Miracle series set in rural Lickin Creek, Pennsylvania, a fictional town not unlike her own real-life home of Chambersburg, PA.

She invites you to tour her website. Here you can find Valerie's reminisence of her childhood on Okinawa, recipes themed to her books, and links to some very mysterious and interesting places.

For a free signed bookplate or to correspond, feel free to drop her a note. To locate new or copies of out-of-print books, Valerie supports The Independent Mystery Booksellers.

The following essays first appeared in the RYUKYU SHIMPO. They are a series about Valerie's childhood in Okinawa during the early years of the American occupation of the Ryukyu Islands

OUR ARRIVAL

In the summer of 1995, I visited Okinawa for the first time in many years. At the touching dedication of the Peace Memorial, my thoughts returned to the day, nearly fifty years ago, when I first saw the beautiful island of Okinawa.

It was Thanksgiving Day, 1946, and also my mother's birthday. I was an eight-year-old girl from Boston, Massachusetts, who, at that time, had no idea that the island would be my home for the next twelve years. I had only one thing on my mind: seeing my father for the first time in nearly four years.

Our trip on the General Hodges, a converted Navy hospital ship, took nineteen days, and I was seasick every one of them. Still, I'll never forget the thrill of seeing Fujiyama, rising from the morning mists while dozens of tiny rainbows danced around our ship. Our arrival was not what we had expected, since we were a day early and no one was there to meet us. "Maybe it's the wrong island," I suggested. My mother stared in stunned silence at the bare, brown hills. There wasn't a single building or tree in sight. Hours later, a jeep sped toward us in a cloud of white coral dust, and my father jumped out, looking older and thinner than I remembered. After an exciting reunion, he took us to our new home.

This was a small Quonset hut, which resembled a tin can lying on its side in the mud. We had two rooms on one side, separated by a shower from the rooms of the two officers who lived on the other side. There were no shower doors, and the only way to ensure privacy was to sing, loudly, while showering.

For a city girl, the most dismaying thing I discovered on that first day was that we had no bathroom. On my first visit to the outhouse, I opened the door and saw a gigantic gray, hairy spider. My screams woke the entire compound, and so I was allowed to use the only indoor toilet available the one at the dining hall. There, I lifted the seat and was face to face with a huge rat, frantically swimming in the bowl. Although I'd learned some useful Japanese phrases before we left the States, they'd forgotten to teach me how to say, "There's a rat in the toilet," so I yelled the only thing I could think of, "Danger!" Two cooks burst into the room, armed with butcher's knives, prepared to rescue me from some unknown peril. They were very kind, if very amused, when they saw the source of my fright.

My next disaster came when I plucked a small, red pepper from a bush. I'd never seen one like it and held it up to my face to smell it. I must have squeezed too hard, for it popped and the tiny seeds shot up my nose. I really thought I was going to die. Hours later, after having my nose rinsed endlessly with cold water, I went out exploring again. I returned with a lovely, recently- shed snake skin, and received a long lecture about the dangers of habu, or pit-vipers.

Somehow, I survived my first day on Okinawa, and, despite my many misadventures, I went to bed that night with a smile on my face. My family was together at last. I was home.

MY BEST FRIEND

I first met my best friend on Okinawa in 1948. She was 10, and I was 11 year old. Our families had recently moved to the new American housing area in Machinato, near Naha, and my mother urged me to cross the street and meet her. But that wasn't the way pre-teenagers did things. I waited until I saw her come out in her yard one day, then I went outside and read my pile of American comic books. After an hour or so, she casually walked over, sat down beside me and picked up a Superman comic.

We didn't talk until several hours later when we went inside for Cokes and potato chips and got to know eachother. We were both only children, artistic and creative, and we bonded instantly. From that day on, we were best friends. More than a friend, she was also the sister I never had. We confided in each other about everything, spent every afternoon writing fantastic stories or painting, kept long lists of books we'd read and movies we'd seen, and dreamt about the future together. When we were twelve, we became "blood sisters" and vowed never to let anything come between us--except boys.

When it was time to leave Okinawa, we went to college together in New Mexico. We married at about the same time to men who went on to have successful careers in the government and happily they got along, too, so we were able to continue our friendship as married adults.

For a period of a few years, we were not close. We didn't lose touch, but our lives took separate paths. We reunited at a high school reunion and realized the years hadn't changed us at all; we were still best friends.

A few months later, we went to Italy together. It was the first of many trips we took after our children were grown. Sometimes our husbands went with us, often they did not I will always remember our cruises on the Nile and the Volga, our adventures in Finland, Estonia, Costa Rica, and Italy.

One summer we made a literary pilgrimage of the eastern part of the United States, visiting the House of Seven Gables, Walden Pond, and the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. We even took a pirate cruise out of Mystic Connecticut on a sailing ship.

She and I went together to many of our high school reunions held in places like San Diego, Las Vegas, San Antonio, and Daytona Beach, where we enjoyed spending days reminiscing with our old friends from Okinawa.

In 1995, she and I made a sentimental journey back to Okinawa with another friend, Edwin Katlas. She and I spoke on the phone several times a week. Her calls always began, "This is Joan--in Las Vegas." We were planning to visit China and Tibet in the spring.

But Joan fell ill, and after a valiant battle with her illness, she died on February 17, 2001. Life does go on without my best friend, Joan Emblem Miller, but it will never be the same.