Born in St. Joseph’s hospital Toronto on Christmas Day, 1953 Cate, along with three others who share her birth date, made the front page of The Toronto Star. Her first claim to fame.

Today Cate still resides in the suburb of Long Branch, a mile or so from where she was raised. When she looks out her dining room window, Cate can see where her father and his five siblings lived during the depression of the ‘Dirty Thirties’. She has planted strong roots in the community where, luckily, her daughter, grand-daughter and their significant others have also chosen to live.  

They say everything happens for a reason. It was 3,000 kilometers away, at a trade-show in Vancouver, where Cate met Michael, fortuitously also from Toronto.  Married for 32 years, Cate and Michael share their lives surrounded by the companionship of friends and family. 

As a child, Cate contracted Ocular Histoplasmosis Syndrome, an eye disease that eventually reduced her vision to the point that she was forced into early retirement from her 25-year career as an account executive with a direct marketing firm. Always a big reader, just as she was no longer able to see the printed word, audio books came on the market, saving her sanity.  

With the use of assistive devices, Cate began writing Portals of Hope in 2006 to help adjust to her new vision impairment and to aid in the healing process. Having suffered tragic family loss and illness, it was cathartic to pour her feelings onto the page. Nightly news programs supplied plenty of fodder for current issues that she deems injustices. Eventually, Cate wove the threads of her life and the world around her into the tapestry that became Portals of Hope.