September 28, 2009

A Former Homemaker Seeks a Green Career

Stephen Brashear

Having earned a degree in landscape management, Kristine Bridges volunteers in a municipal greenhouse in Tacoma, Wash., while she looks for a job.

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Stephen Brashear

Having earned a degree in landscape management, Kristine Bridges volunteers in a municipal greenhouse in Tacoma, Wash., while she looks for a job.

By Eric Hoover

Second in an occasional series on adults who seek higher education after turning 50.

If things had been different, Kristine Bridges figures, she would have gone to college and become a forester. She would have worked under the sky, no walls in sight.

In high school, however, she had struggled, flunking a couple of classes, feeling down all the time. She received scant encouragement at home. In the mid 1960s, she recalls, most young women growing in Tacoma, Wash., had