I’m a country girl, through and through! I’ve lived in the city on occasion, but my heart is in the country, and always will be! I was born in a small country town, and grew up there. I was in the eleventh grade when we finally got a high school there; I graduated and then went back to school for an extra year. Yes, I had to get permission from the school board, but most of them knew me personally, so that was not a problem.

That life is no more. We lived in a log cabin that was around a hundred years old when I was born, drank water from a fresh-water spring down the hill from us, and kept hogs out back, chickens near the barn, and a herd of goats that were let loose in the “bottom land” every day to scavenge for themselves. We had a large garden, which Daddy broke up with a one-sided plow, pushed through the dirt by hand, usually. We heated our house with a wood heater, and Mother cooked on a wood stove until about the time my youngest brother, two years younger than me, started to school. We spent a lot of time outdoors, making our own fun, and/or sitting on the front porch in the evenings singing and/or visiting. We knew many of the people in our little town, and they knew us, by name as well as by facial recognition. It was a hard life, but a good life.

When I married my ex, we lived in the college town where we had met. However, we knew very few people in the town except the people he worked with and the ones in our Sunday School class or the choir. He was already a teacher at the college, and I had just graduated when we married. I went back that fall to begin working toward a master’s degree, but then had to stop because I was pregnant with my first child. I finished that education after he was born, and we had moved outside of town into a much smaller town. My ex had grown up out in the country, also, so neither of us had a problem with living outside of town. We raised our children there, on our 23 acres of land.

When I left him, our youngest two were in college; the oldest had graduated and moved with his wife to Houston. I moved back into that same college town, where I lived for the next two years. Then I got another job at another college; that precipitated a move to a much larger town. I was living there when I met my present husband, 35 years after we graduated from high school together. We had our first class reunion, and both of us were single again. From then until we married, our relationship was a yo-yo, but then it settled down.

We built a house right where I had grown up and lived there for about six years, until we could no longer afford to make the payments on the house; then we moved to another small community, and he has built us a house here. We again live out in the country, and have family on both sides of us. We love it here, and have no plans to ever move again, until it is time for us to move to the cemetery. By the way, that, too, is in the country!