Is Fire Goddess Spelled with Two Ds

When I was young, I saw a movie about mysterious island that had an erupting volcano. The island was ruled by a beautiful woman called "Tandaleah, the Fire Goddess of the Volcano." since than I desperately wanted to be the Fire Goddess. I wrote it on my list of "Things to Be When I Grow Up," and asked my girlfriend if "Fire Goddess" was spelled with two Ds.

Through the years, the school system did its best to mold me into a no longer sans responsible, respectable citizen, and Tandaleah was forgot-ten. I spent the next twenty-five years being a good wife, eventually the mother of four .

But The week I turned fifty my marriage came to a sudden end. everything I'd owned was auctioned off to pay debts I didn't even know existed. In a week I'd lost my husband, my home and my parents, who refused to accept a divorce in the family. I had enough money to rent a cheap apartment while I looked for a job. Or I could use every penny I had to buy five plane tickets from Missouri to the most remote island in the world, the Big Island of Hawaii. Everyone said I was crazy to think I could just run off to an island and survive. They predicted I'd come crawling back in a month. Part of me was afraid they were right. The next day, my four children and I landed on the Big Island of Hawaii with less than two thousand dollars, knowing no one in the world was going to help us. I rented an unfurnished apartment where we slept on the floor and lived on cereal. I worked three jobs scrubbing floors on my hands and knees, selling macadamia nuts to tourists and gathering coconuts. I worked eighteen hours a day and lost thirty pounds because I lived on one meal a day.

One night, as I walked alone on the beach, I saw the red-orange glow of the lava pouring out of the Kilauea volcano in the distance.

I'd almost achieved my childhood dream-but hadn't realized it because I was focused on my burdens instead of my blessings. It was time to live my imagination-not my history.

Tandaleah, the Fire Goddess of the Volcano, had finally arrived! The next day I quit my jobs and invested my last paycheck in art supplies and began doing what I loved. I hadn't painted a picture in fifteen years. I wondered if I could still paint or if I'd forgotten how. My hands trembled the first time I picked up a brush, but before an hour had passed I was lost in the colors spreading across the canvas in front of me. I sailing as I started believing in myself, other people started believing in me, too. the first painting sold for fifteen hundred dollars before I even had time to frame it.

The past six years have been filled with adventures: My children and I have gone swimming with dolphins, watched whales and hiked around the crater rim of the volcano. We wake up every morning with the ocean in front of us and the volcano behind us. The dream I'd had more than forty years ago is now reality. I live on an island with a continuously erupting volcano. I am Tandaleah, the Fire Goddess of the Volcano, spelled with two Ds and I'm living