by CONNIE TABBERT
Editor
COBDEN — A Cobden author is hopeful grandmothers will purchase her first children’s book for their grandchildren, so they can enjoy her first children’s story as much as her grandchildren do.
Jane Fulton has written eight medical/clinical books. However, she decided to have a story published eight years ago that she first wrote for her grandchildren. And, this thought was put into her head by her best friend of 50 years.
The story she wrote is true because it happened on her farm, Ms. Fulton said. Before retiring from teaching, Ms. Fulton raised Boer goats.
“They have a lovely personality and they come from South Africa and are for meat and milk.
“I also had lovely rabbits, pets for children.
“One rabbit escaped from the hutch and attached himself to the dominant nanny goat in the herd of eight,” she said, continuing, “He spent a whole year by her side. She slept beside her. Went wherever she was grazing. Ate the leaves she did. And he slept right beside her. He adopted her as his friend.”
While the story was fun to write, Ms. Fulton said there is a theme to the story — it doesn’t matter what your friends look like.
“Friends can be really different from you,” she said. “They can be bigger than you, they can be smaller than you, but isn’t it wonderful to have a friend.”
Ms. Fulton has authored and co-authored eight clinical/medical books. Her most recent publication is Spending Smarter and Spending Less. It’s a way of thinking outside the box and providing people with better palliative care that is more meaningful to them, she said.
One of the items in the book is a strong belief that care should be in a person’s home, not a hospital, she said. While listening to CBC radio Tuesday morning, Ms. Fulton was quite thrilled to hear that the Canadian Cancer Society said palliative care should be at home because it’s more humane and costs one-tenth as much to have someone die in a hospital.
“They finally got it after 20 years of me trying to say hospitals are not the best place for everything,” she said. “They are perfect for some things, but not great for everything. And we need, as capable Canadians, to stand up and say we agree with the Canadian Cancer Society and we do want to have palliative care at home.”
When asked why she went from writing medical books to a children’s book, Ms. Fulton said, with a laugh, “It’s so much fun!”
Looking back to when she wrote the children’s story, Ms. Fulton said, “Like many other older women in the Ottawa Valley, I had grandchildren and I wanted to do something special for my grandchildren.”
They had been fascinated when she told them about the relationship between the rabbit and goat , so she decided to write it down, create a few drawings to go with it, and put it all in a three-ring binder.
Ms. Wilson came to her farm for a visit, saw the binder and asked if she could illustrate the story. Then, they decided to get it published.
The book, This Rabbit is in Charge, was published in 2008.
Ms. Fulton said it hasn’t really been available to the general public until recently, because it was used as a fundraiser for the Ontario Cerebral Palsy and the therapeutic riding association in Ottawa for children who are quadriplegic and paraplegic.
She decided on those two charities because she has an 18-year-old grandson who suffered a brain injury causing him to become a quadriplegic when he was a year old.
“It’s amazing what you need to learn to be the grandmother of a child with a disability and becoming a fund raiser is one of those things grandmothers need to do,” she said. “When you have grandchildren in hockey, you fundraise for hockey. I have a grandchild who needs enormous therapeutic support and I raise money for that.
“He is a very loving and wonderful human being,” Ms. Fulton said.
And now, at 70 years old, Ms. Fulton is waiting for the artwork to be completed so her second children’s book can be published.
It’s about two little boys who discover a seagull on the beach and spend the summer with it, she said. The seagull teaches the young boys about marine life, such as crabs, fish and plants, while the little boys teach the seagull about peanut butter and jam sandwiches.
“The message in the story is, isn’t it amazing what we can learn from each other, even if one of us is a seagull,” Ms. Fulton said.
Her first book was for children aged three to five, while the second book targets children who are five to 10 years old.
Ms. Fulton believes a book should have a purpose and it must meet that purpose. The purpose of her first children’s book was nothing more than to entertain her grandchildren and hopefully other grandmother’s grandchildren, she said.
Her clinical books were the exploration of a completely different way of thinking about how health care is delivered, not just in Cobden, but everything, she said.
“So much of what we have done in the past has only been done in hospitals because hospitals were the only places that were paid for by the federal and provincial governments,” Ms. Fulton said. “Lots of things migrated into hospitals that never should have been there in the first place. The problem is when you try to change the way business is done, you have an impact on somebody’s job, somebody’s wealth, somebody’s privilege, somebody’s sense of power, and people don’t like that kind of thinking.”
Looking back over her life, Ms. Fulton was teaching high school when she decided to return to university where she earned a PhD in clinical medicine after earning a master’s degree in public health.
Living in Ottawa, Ms. Fulton didn’t want her four teenaged daughters spending weekends at the Rideau Centre, so purchased the farm on the Zion Line.
“This area is a very beautiful part of the world,” she said. “I think it’s undiscovered in many ways.”
Ms. Fulton admitted she has not made money farming, but she has contributed significantly to the learning experience of many teenagers, and continues to do so even though her children are grown up and have families of their own.
Her farm is a learning centre for the Renfrew County Stewardship Program and the environmental science program at Algonquin College.
“I’ve continued to encourage the farm to be a place where teenagers can come and learn,” she said.
At one time it was a working farm with livestock and forage crops, Ms. Fulton said, but it’s now a tree farm, but she won’t see the harvest of the first crop.
“My first big harvest will be in 2086,” she said. “There are 11 species of mixed forest.”
A teacher, mother, author and caregiver, Ms. Fulton said as people proceed through life, they need to give themselves permission to change who they are and become something new.
“It makes life interesting,” she said.
Ms. Fulton said This Rabbit is in Charge is available at The Candlewick Gift Shop and Main St. Spa in Cobden.
