Category: Writings

In 1953, just as we were getting used to Wichita, Daddy finished his night school to learn plumbing and heating – and decided he didn’t like his boss at Boeing – so we moved again. This time, we headed to Green City, a tiny town in northern Missouri, near my paternal grandparents – the Piggs. There were lots of Piggs in Missouri in more ways than one. So when I started first grade the next fall, at age five, nobody made fun of me.

I loved my first-grade teacher, Miss Fetters, and had a crush on her nephew, Dennis, who also was in my class. At first, I missed Cindy terribly, but was so excited about learning to read, I was content. Also, Mother and Cindy walked me to school each morning – we only lived two houses from the schoolhouse – and fetched me for lunch, then met me again after school. The big bonus was, I got to read books to Cindy.

We found a box of children’s books in the old corncrib behind our house (yes, it was in town) and soon became avid readers. Well, I read. Cindy listened.

Previously, Mother and Daddy and Andrea had lived in Missouri after the war, before we little girls were born. They had lived in the Flea House, the Mouse House and the Bedbug House. You figure it out. We called this place the Crooked House.The house was so slanted, when Mother set food on the kitchen table for dinner, she had to set it on damp dishtowels, so the bowls wouldn’t slide from one end to the other.

Friday nights were special. It was Daddy’s night to go to the local saloon with his farmer friends. And it was our night to play! Mother’ s fascination with films had never relented. We saw every movie that came through town. Cindy and I loved “The Gypsy Colt” and “the Littlest Outlaw,” both movies about horses. But Andrea’s obsession with horses made her the biggest fan of all. Mother especially loved the singing and dancing movies and for weeks afterward, she’d grab one of us girls and dance us around the kitchen, singing at the top of her voice. We joined in, of course. We knew all the words to all the songs.

One of our favorite things to do was to visit Wilson’s Café. Willie and Jane Wilson were the nicest people you would ever meet. Mother would give Cindy and me a nickel each to go get an ice cream cone. It was near our house, so we would walk, hand in hand, into the café and scoot up to the bar stools by the counter. Willie would see us coming and quickly dip out one vanilla cone for Cindy and one chocolate for me. He would never take our nickels. For years after we moved, I wrote to them every year at Christmas, regaling them with stories of my fascinating life. Willie always wrote back. One year, when I was in college, no letter came. They had both passed away. But I still cherish the memory of them.

We spent a lot of time on the farm not far from town with our grandparents. We especially loved being near our Grandad Pigg. He always had a big smile and a hearty laugh and he genuinely liked us. would play the harmonica – “Little Brown Jug” was his specialty – and Cindy and I would dance what we thought an Irish jig might look like. We hopped around a lot, anyway. He’d laugh and play some more. He also let us ride on his gentle old bay mare, Lady.

Andrea loved Lady with a passion that never died – later in life, she raised Arabian horses. Sometimes, Grandad would put Cindy and me on Lady’s back and Andrea would lead her around. She only led us under the clothesline once. It was a long fall and my neck was scraped raw from the lines (I was up front). As I lay there looking up at a giant horse hoof dangling above my face, Andrea pulled me out so Lady could put her foot down. She was a good old horse.

Their little farmhouse was not far from the barn and every night the cows plodded past the back door on their way from the pasture to the barn to be milked. As a result, they left a clear trail of cowpies leading from the back door to the barn door. Most of them were dried up and made great steppingstones for two little girls looking for something to do.

“Let’s go cowpie hoppin’” one of us would say and we’d be off and jumping from one to the next (sort of a rural version of hopscotch, without the chalk). However, once in a while a fresh one LOOKED like a dried one and we’d land … squish! Good thing we were barefoot. Grossed out, we’d run through grass, hollering for Mother. She’d come out and have us put our feet under the pump (no indoor plumbing) and she’d wash them off with a few mighty splashes. Then we’d go back to hoppin’ again. Seems we were slow learners!

We seemed to be accident-prone, especially Cindy. One Friday night, when Daddy was uptown – two blocks away – Cindy took it in her head to pretend to walk down the arm of a big, overstuffed chair arms stretched wide for balance. (She had this fantasy that she wanted to be a tightrope walker in the circus.)

Mother, looking over her shoulder while doing the dishes, called out, “Cindy, if you don’t look out, you’re going to fall off and break your arm!” Which she promptly did. Andrea ran to the saloon to get Daddy and we all went to the doctor. We did that a lot with Cindy.

We had just settled in, and were liking our new lives, when Daddy decided we couldn’t make a living there. Mother’s parents – Grandad and Grandmother Mares – said he could get a job using his plumber’s license in Minnesota. So we packed up once again and moved north. This time, though we were in for the long haul. (See Chapter 1: The Elsenpeter Place.)

Cindy and I both got car sick and threw up all over Iowa. If we’d known what awaited us, we might have saved it for Minnesota.

From earliest memory my little sister, Cindy, was part of me. I was sixteen months old when she was born, like me, in Oklahoma City. Daddy, who was selling real estate at the time, did what he usually did. He dropped Mother off at the hospital entrance to have the new baby. He never was with her during any of our births. He didn’t like “stuff like that.” So he took a couple of days off of work to take care of big sister Andrea and me, then picked Mother up at the hospital with Cindy when it was time, dropped us all off at home, and immediately went back to work.

Mother says I stood in my crib, my dark eyes peering over the top bar, staring at her blonde hair and blue eyes in the bassinet next to me. When Mother fed Cindy, I climbed on her lap, a rubber nipple from my old baby bottle stuck on my thumb and my Blankie tucked under my chin, to snuggle and watch them.

“You took possession of her right away,” Mother used to say. “Like she was your baby.”

I tried to help feed her in her high chair, getting as much food on me as in her, and probably helping myself to a few bites of baby-food pears along the way. I helped her take her first steps, and one of her first words was “Ninda.”

All our names were too elegant – Andrea, Linda and Cynthia – for the last name that accompanied them. I always felt we should have been named things like Wanda Jean or Billie Jo. She had high hopes for all of us. You’ve got to give her that.

She had toyed with the idea of naming us after movie stars because, as I have said before, she loved the movies. We thanked our lucky stars that she hadn’t named us after Hedy Lamarr, Myrna Loy or Merle Oberon – none of which goes real well with Pigg. Like anything did.

So as much as we came to bemoan our last name, we at least kind of liked our first names, and eventually all married and dumped the maiden name. No hyphenating for us!

As soon as Cindy could walk, we went everywhere together, holding hands much of the time.

By the time we moved to Wichita, Kansas, I was 4 and supposedly old enough for kindergarten. I wasn’t ready. I was bereft to be separated from my kid sister. I cried myself to sleep at naptime each morning. Miss Kinkaid, the crabby kindergarten teacher, finally just left me asleep when the other kids woke up, and told Mother I wasn’t ready for school. So I was a kindergarten drop-out, and happy to be one.

It was also about this time when I took to hiding.

One summer day, Daddy was working in the garage, Mother was in the kitchen, and Cindy was taking her nap. I was playing outside with our dog Queenie and noticed a sliver of dark, shadowed space behind a sheet of plywood standing up against the studs inside the garage. I slipped behind it and stood there, enjoying the cool spot.
Mother came out of the house.
“Have you seen Linda?” she asked Daddy.
“I thought she went in the house,” he replied.
They began searching for me, calling my name, casually at first, then more frantically.
Soon, the next-door neighbors became involved. They wandered up the street, calling my name. The more they searched, the more frightened I became. I didn’t want to be discovered. I began to sweat, and wanted to cry, but I couldn’t come out.
I don’t know why.
Soon, lots of people were calling me and looking for my little body, doubtless drowned in a ditch or hit by a runaway car. Finally, Daddy pulled the sheet of plywood away from the wall, little expecting to find me there, and I burst into sobs. Tucked between the studs, itchy and sweaty and crying, I don’t think he knew whether to hug me or spank me. While he was deciding, a frantic Mother snatched me up, hugging me and crying all the way to the house.
“You scared us!” she kept saying.
A few months later, during a family gathering, I got bored. Cindy was sitting on Daddy’s lap and Andrea was playing with our cousins. So I wandered away from the boring adult chatter and went into my parents’ bedroom. I never went in there by myself. The closet door stood ajar, and I peeked in. There I saw Daddy’s tall leather hunting boots. I loved those boots. I squirmed my way past long winter coats and Sunday dresses, and stepped into them. They came up to my hips. The clothes fell shut in front of me like a theater curtain. I was trapped. Yes, I could have just as easily gotten out as in, but now I was hiding.
Soon, Mother began searching for me.
“Where’s Linda?” she asked aunts, uncles, cousins.
No one had seen me.
The search was on.
This time, they were as much angry as scared.
“Where are you?” Mother’s voice had an edge to it that said I was in trouble.
I surely couldn’t come out now.
I stood in that hot, suffocating closet for at least an eternity. I sweated, silent tears rolling down my face, wiping at my snotty nose with my fist, afraid they’d find me, and afraid they wouldn’t.
Several people looked into the closet; it wasn’t till my father finally parted the clothes to find me standing hip-deep in his tall leather boots that the search was over. I cried so hard, I got the hiccups.
“Why do you keep doing this?” Mother asked.
I didn’t know then and I still don’t. But I quit hiding after that. It was just too stressful!

It was the same with having my picture taken.

One of my earliest memories is getting spanked by Daddy because I wouldn’t pose for a Pigg family portrait. An extended set of relatives had gathered for some event – perhaps one of my grandparents’ birthdays. All the adults and children – maybe 30 or so of us – were going to be in a photograph.
I’m the only one crying. Cindy has her head tucked, shyly, into my shoulder and she’s holding my hand.

Cindy and I spent our days playing with our dolls, exploring our neighborhood and following Mother around asking questions. Once, we made mud pies in the back yard after it rained. They looked pretty good, so we tasted them. And we got pin worms. You don’t want to know the details!

One day, I spied workmen in the street lifting a lid right out of the pavement. They sent a hose down the hole it left to do some other mysterious stuff. I wanted one of those lids. After they left, Cindy stood guard while I went out and lifted the manhole cover out of its moorings and carried it the few steps to our driveway. Then I dropped it on my big toe. Hey, it was heavy and I was a scrawny kid.

Cindy cried as hard as I did, as if she, too, could feel the pain. We did that a lot. My toenail turned black and fell off, eventually. Mother and Daddy never did figure out how I did it.

Mother always said Cindy and I had a silent form of communication. Without a word, we’d just look at each other, both jump up and head to our room at the same time.

But Wichita was just another stop on Daddy’s search to find … something. So we moved again. And we heeded to Missouri, his home state. As usual, he left Mother behind to sell the house, pack everything and move it all and three little girls to our new home.

Mother loved to play jokes. She was the Queen of Laughter, and I learned early on it was better to be part of the joke then to be its intended victim. In the winter of 1954-55 I was four going on five years old. My sisters, Linda and Andrea, were both going to school and I was left alone at the house with Mother. We didn’t have a TV, so the only entertainment I had was self-made, and at four years old my creativity was somewhat limited.

I was used to playing all day with Linda who is 16 months older than I. We were always looking for something fun to do, and we weren’t too shy about what it might be. One day we decided to sneak into Mother and Daddy’s bedroom (we weren’t allowed in there). Looking around, the only exciting thing we could find was the large double bed. So we climbed up and began jumping. Of course, I lost my balance and knocked their bedside lamp off onto the floor and it broke into a number of pieces.

We stopped jumping.

Silence.

So we climbed downoff the bed and attempted to put the lamp back together. We thought we did a pretty good job. The lampshade was a little low, but we thought when Mother and Daddy went to turn it on they’d think they broke it. We left the room and went downstairs to innocently play with toys in the living room.

What seemed like hours later (probably 10 minutes) Mother went upstairs. And then we heard it: “Linda! Cindy! Come up here right now.” Up we went. When we got to her room she said: “Cindy. Linda. You know you’re not supposed to be in here! And you know you’re not supposed to jump on the beds!”

Linda and I stood there, holding hands, and I said: “But you and Daddy jump on the bed ‘cause we hears you, don’t we Linda?” She stood there, very quiet, looking as if she were chewing gum and just waved us on our way. We weren’t sure why we got off so easy, but believe me we headed for the stairs as fast as we could go.

But, back to my four-year-old dilemma of being bored in the middle of winter, alone in the house all day with just Mother. I think, at first, Mother felt the need to entertain me, so she took to jumping out from behind a door and scaring me. I’d shriek, and run, and she’d chase me, and we’d both end up laughing.

Now, at the age of four I wasn’t very savvy, but I did know that mimicking was a great equalizer. So I took to hiding and scaring my mom throughout the day, every day that my sisters were at school. I got pretty creative at this job. No hiding behind doors for me! Nope. i would bury myself in the laundry basket, under clothes, and then spring up! Or I would hide in the cupboard under the sink, and sit very still until she reached under to get something then I’d touch her arm. Quiet scares are the best. She hated mice, so a soft touch was always a winner.

Really pulling off a good scare takes practice. That winter I perfected my approach, learning all about timing, awareness, and knowing where the victim is vulnerable.

Learning the tricks of the trade early in life has kept day to day living eventful. I’d go on to learn many a bad habit from my Mother, including how to play excellent practical jokes, but much of my trickster nature came from that cold winter, alone with Mother, who had decided the best way to keep her littlest girl happy was to scare the hell out of her.

Today, as I was writing up this memory, I thought how I’d matured (now being 75). But then I remembered, that this morning when I went down to breakfast (we’re staying at a hotel that has a morning buffet) I walked up to the host who seats me every morning. He is a very classy guy. He was so intent on something he was reading that, you know, I couldn’t help myself so I jumped around the corner and said “boo!”  And boy did he jump!

Scaredy Cat.

Cindy and I didn’t know we were poor. Andrea, four years older than me and always more observant, figured it out but apparently didn’t tell us.  So we happily basked in our ignorance.

With little money coming from Daddy, whiling away his time in Missouri (supposedly putting a bathroom in his parents’ house), Mother hoarded every cent to make ends meet. She sewed our uniforms for school, and showed us how to cut cardboard to plug up holes in the soles of our shoes.She was a pro – having done that herself as a kid.

We went shopping at Atlantic Mills, a super-cheap outlet store in Minneapolis. My Aunt Jeanne, mother’s sister, had told her about it. We could get 29-cent white blouses to go under our school uniforms, and cheap underwear and socks, too.

Food was another problem.  But a fairy godfather fixed that.

Mother’s Uncle Ed, who worked for Libby Foods in Minneapolis, was able to get us free cases of food – dented cans that the stores couldn’t sell. (Nobody seemed to think that was dangerous in those days.)

Problem was, the labels had been removed. So we got good at guessing what was inside. We knew from the sound they made when shaken and the shapes of the cans which were fruits and vegetables, and how to spot the occasional can of corned beef hash (taller than the vegetables, skinnier than the fruit). We never once got botulism.

Mother turned dinner into an adventure.

“So, what are we having tonight?” she’d ask as we gathered around, shook and guessed and, when we finally opened cans, saw what had been chosen. Pot luck at its epitome. It might be green beans, peaches and hamburgers. Or corn, pears and – hamburgers again. We ate a lot of hamburgers.

Sometimes, on a Friday night, she’d say: “Should we have a nice dinner tonight or should we just have hamburgers again and go to a movie?”

Well, guess what we always picked. Mother loved movies.  She’d worked as an usher in the Maple Lake theater as a teenager and always bragged that she got to see “Gone with the Wind” seventeen times!

But I digress … back to dinner.

No matter how poor we were, though, Sunday dinner was always fried chicken. We could make a chicken last for at least two meals for all of us, maybe more. And hers was the best. Dipped in flour and fried in bacon drippings and butter – well, yum.

One stormy November night, as we were eating a mysterious casserole of leftovers, there was a loud thump that had us all dropping our forks and scrambling out the back door.

The wild autumn wind had blown not only early snow, but also a full-grown ring-necked pheasant, into the side of the house. It was dead. Pitiful, lying there in the accumulating snow. We all crooned, “Poor thing,” gazing sadly upon its broken body.

Then Mother snatched it from the ground, held it up by its limp feet and did a little dance.

“Meat!” she cried, and we girls danced with her, like heathen hunters around a bonfire.

The next night our canned peas and plums were served with roast pheasant, thank you very much.

By Christmas, we were so destitute, Mother waited till the last minute to buy a scrawny tree for a dollar and we girls sat around making paper-chain ornaments out of cut-up magazines or the Sunday funnies (courtesy of our grandparents). On the last day of school before Christmas break, we arrived home to discover a marvelous thing.

Mother, a child of the Depression, had learned to be clever and creative. She had scrounged through the junk in the basement and found partial cans of paint – including red enamel and metallic gold. She had painted the wall behind the tree scarlet and dabbed it with shimmering gold dots. She set a small lamp on the floor behind the tree to illuminate her art work.

It was gorgeous!

Once again, I wondered later if the bulldozer operator who razed the house right after we moved out stopped to admire its uniqueness – and wonder who the heck had lived here.

Daddy had come home briefly for Thanksgiving, arriving on the train one frosty Saturday afternoon, but didn’t stay long. He cursed the cold and left again the day after Turkey Day. I think he just wanted a good meal. He didn’t come back for Christmas and he didn’t send presents. 

Somehow, Mother found the means to get us each a new doll. Grandmother Mares (her mom) always sewed us new pajamas. And our Aunt Olive (Daddy’s “rich” sister) always sent us new slippers. We needed them in this house for sure!

Through the long winter, Mother turned hardship into a game. We huddled in the kitchen at night – it and the adjacent dining room being the only rooms with a source of heat. 

We got really good at the game of “Let’s Pretend.”

“Let’s pretend …” she would begin, and we’d all lean forward in anticipation.

“We’re in a giant cave during a blizzard,” Motherwould say, setting the stage. Or, “We’re on a ship at sea during a storm.” It became a lovely game, the cold seeping into our bones to lend a remarkable touch of reality.

But even Minnesota winters come to an end.

Easter and spring were welcome, as they always are in the North Country. The frozen ground seemed less stiff beneath our leaky boots. The smell of thawing earth scented the still-chill nights, and birds we hadn’t seen in months were making their way back to our part of the world.

Mother made us ruffled organdy Easter Sunday dresses, using fabric our grandmother had given her. I don’t know why – she hated sewing.  Mine was blue; Cindy’s was pink. Andrea said she was too old for organdy, and wore a hand-me-down navy-blue polka-dot dress from our cousin, Dixie Pigg.

We walked into church that Sunday so proud of our finery, too proud to wear the bulky sweaters the chilly day demanded. Our slightly cracked, too-small patent leather shoes were Vaseline-shined and displayed nicely the white 9-cent socks with tiny ruffles on them. (A bargain-bin buy at Atlantic Mills.)

That morning, we girls had been thrilled to find the Easter bunny had visited our waiting baskets, and had added sugared marshmallow bunnies, jelly beans, even a piece of chocolate, to the hard-boiled eggs we’d colored the night before.

After church, Mother stopped to talk to Mrs. Sherman (not her real name), who lived down the road from us. When we got in the car, she said our neighbor had been crying, because the Sherman kids were disappointed that the Easter bunny hadn’t come for them.

Silence permeated the old Studebaker as Mother navigated the rough, rutted road home. When we got there, we girls knew what she would want us to do.  We each took part of the candy from our baskets, and made up a shoebox of goodies, complete with wisps of shredded green paper grass, for the neighbors’ six children. 

We took it over to their house, about a quarter mile up the road, and Mrs. Sherman cried once again at the kindness. The children were shy, but their eyes shone brightly at the rare treat. Mother explained that the Easter bunny had accidentally left their candy at the wrong house.

“We don’t have a lot,” Mother said, on the drive home “but we’ve got more than some people.”

And she wrestled the blue car down the rutted, muddy lane toward home.

After Daddy left us in Minnesota to go “help out” his folks down in Missouri, things in Minnesota got rough. With no central heating, the castle got pretty nippy.

The first storms came in October, roaring around the drafty old house like angry dragons, breathing ice instead of fire. We huddled under mounds of blankets and quilts at night. Mornings, Mother would warm our robes and slippers by the glass-fronted gas fire downstairs, then run them up to us. She’d shove them under the covers for us to put on, then count, “One, two, three, GO!”

We’d hit the floor running, tear down the L-shaped flight of stairs and hit the front hallway – which wasn’t heated. The floor would sparkle with frost (sort of a “Dr. Zhivago” effect) and, as our warm slippers hit it, turn into an ice rink. We’d spread our arms wide and slide till we hit the swinging door that went into the kitchen.

What fun!

At first, we took the bus to school. Andrea – four years older than me – and I would walk down to the end of the long driveway in the semi-dark on those frigid Minnesota mornings and stand there, flapping our arms to stay warm, crying from the cold, the tears freezing on our cheeks. (Cindy hadn’t started first grade yet.)

Once on the bus, being the new kids (which we remained for years) in a small-town ,we were teased relentlessly about our last name – Pigg – which we didn’t even know was funny till we got here. (It was a common name in Missouri, where Daddy grew up. There’s even a whole Pigg Family Cemetery there!)) We whined about riding the rickety bus with the local bullies – mostly (and ironically) the Wurm boys.

It didn’t help that we’d adopted two runt piglets that Uncle Bill was going to kill, and hand-raised them that summer. We named them Red and Annabelle, after some friends of our parents, and the runts thought they were dogs. They slept on the back porch, ate out of a dog dish, and followed us everywhere.

Even to the school bus stop that fall. Then they’d chase the bus! Short little legs pumping, squealing and running, curly tails spinning, till they ran out of steam. Pigs can’t run real far.

“Hey, your sisters are chasing the bus again!” the boys would taunt. My face would burn. Andrea would glare at them. She gave at least one of them a bloody nose. It didn’t help.

The other kids would oink as we got on the bus, or walked by them in the hall at school. Andrea punched out a few more of them. I cried.

So, when the weather got warm enough for the roads to be passable by our old blue Studebaker, Mother drove us. She didn’t have a driver’s license (never bothered or even had a chance, really) but details like that never stopped her. Some of those rides were terrifying.

One muddy spring day, we were headed home from school and Mother started sliding as she descended a little hill lined with saplings. The car swerved and spun and pitched and jumped and hit at least one tree. We flew around the back seat, grabbing each other, door handles, whatever was handy. But when we finally came to a stop, we were headed back the way we came.

“Well, that was fun!” she said, laughing.

She just pulled into a neighbor’s driveway, turned around and tackled it again. Slower this time.  When we got home, she surveyed the car.

“Not a scratch,” she proclaimed. The next day, the school janitor asked her why her front bumper was off-center by about a foot.

From a child’s-eye-view, the decrepit, peeling three-story house looked like a castle. Dormers, stained-glass windows, and a steep roof gave it a lofty appearance. Surely, at some point, a princess had lived here!

In rural Minnesota, places often get their names from the family that built them, or lived here first. There was the Pribyl Farm, the Zanders House, and so on.  This was the Elsenpeter Place. Not quite a farm, but more than just a house. Woods. Small fields. And a rock pile between them.

My little sister, Cindy, and I didn’t know it was a dump. Through 5- and 6-year-old eyes, we saw an exciting place, a world to explore and have adventures. The broken latticework around the base of the sagging front porch surely led to a great hidey-hole. (We hadn’t considered spiders at that point.)

Moving to Minnesota in the early 1950s was just the latest in our uprootings. Cindy and I, born in Oklahoma City, had also lived in Wichita and rural Missouri in our young lives. Now, we had moved near our maternal grandparents in Maple Lake, where Daddy, a newly licensed plumber, was going to work for a guy who owned a plumbing and heating business.

We moved to Minnesota in June, when the ravenous mosquitoes were hatching and muggy days were unrelieved by muggier nights. Some nights, even our thin cotton nightgowns lay upon our clammy skin like woolen winter coats.

A small lake behind our woods was a good spot to hang out, wade and to fish – well, our cane poles lay on the bank, bobbers bobbing on the water’s surface, while Cindy and I played tag or made mud castles on the shore.  Once in a while, we actually caught a little perch or catfish and chased the pole into the water before our “catch” got away.

We’d dig worms, making sure Cindy didn’t eat any, and take them, along with our bologna-and-Miracle Whip-on-white-bread sandwiches and red Kool-Aid (Cindy’s favorite “flavor”) to the lake. We’d catch polliwogs, and once we got chased by a skunk who didn’t appreciate our dog, Queenie, sticking her nose into its burrow.

I had no idea we could run that fast, or that we could scale a nearly vertical bank in just seconds.

She was a good hunter, that Queenie. But she was too smart to mess with a skunk. On her short little dachshund-mix legs, she outran us, leaving us for skink bait!

That summer was idyllic. Daddy never paid much attention to us unless we got into trouble, and Mother was busy trying to make a home out of this place – no easy task. So, pretty much unattended, we girls ran and played … and dug a pit in the front yard for a fort.

Daddy paid attention to us then. He stood guard while we fetched all the dirt and filled the hole back in.

We played in the rock pile, tucked between woods and fields, until one day we disturbed a nest of mice and had to scramble up the spindly trees, calling Mother to come rescue us. She wouldn’t.

“Just jump down and run,” she kept hollering from the safety of the back porch. Turns out, she hated mice as much as we did. (Remind me to tell you about the “mouse house” sometime.)

One of our favorite spots was in the center of the woods. Here was our magic tree. About eight feet tall, or so it seemed to us at the time,  the dead trunk probably had been struck by lightning years before and now stood, weathered silvery smooth as paper. It was the perfect canvas for two little girls who wanted their own totem pole and had the cigar box full of broken crayons needed to do the job.

I often wondered if, after we moved, and the woods were cleared to make more farm land, if the guy running the bulldozer didn’t stop and marvel for just a minute before toppling our multicolored totem tree.

Come fall, Daddy decided he didn’t like working for his new boss (he never did, which is one reason we’d moved so much) and took the train back to Missouri to live with his folks on the farm for the winter. The farm barely supported my grandparents and uncle, much less us, too. He seldom sent money.

So there we were. Mother and three little girls (including our older sister, Andrea), miles from town on a rutted dirt road, with an unreliable blue Studebaker for transportation. The drafty old house had no central plumbing or heating, and no insulation.

We stayed, and he left, on the eve of a brutal winter.