I remember our home on Dairy Road. There was our house and an elderly couple living next door. That was it. Us and pastures and cows - oh, and a rodeo next door on Friday nights. I remember being five years old - and Daddy never lived with us again.
Then we moved to Brookhollow. Wonderful, 1950's-growing-up-neighborhood. We played outside from sunup to sundown. Riding bicycles, eating from the ice cream truck, playing Monopoly with neighbors with games that lasted days. Street lights came on, and we were supposed to go home. Mimosa trees in the front yard...
Then Momma and Daddy's breakup was official - and we moved to a stucco house in Abilene. There was a candy making business up the street, huge trees in the yard. (eew! They were full of strange bugs - zillions of them!) Momma painted one of the walls in the living room a rich deep red and hung our treasured 4 x 8 bevel-edged mirror on it. At Christmas she painted a scene of Bethelhem from afar with angels watching down from heaven. It was beautiful beyond belief. I think that stayed up there until March when my oldest brother's birthday mirror was due to be painted. We only lived in Abilene for a short while. Momma had started an art business with a man. All I remember about him was that he had a leg brace - maybe from polio as a child?
It was in Abilene that Christ came into my life. An elderly couple living next door had a granddaughter visit for the summer, and she invited us to something - Vacation Bible School? I think maybe my brothers and sister went once, but I kept going. I would come home so full of happiness. When I walked into the house everyone would be angry and fussing. I never understood why they didn't want to be happy.
Within about a year - maybe a little more - we moved to Nashville, Tennessee. The house was on acres of land with hundreds of trees. Really, really rich people lived next door. We were pretty isolated, definitely not Brookhollow. I got invited to my first dance while we lived there. We were there for three years.
Then everything got left behind except us and our clothing - and the mirror which was to be shipped to us. We moved into a rent house in the Oak Cliff area of Texas until Momma could find a job, then bought a house close to that job. When the mirror was delivered the crew managed to shatter it into a million pieces.
It was there that things got very lonely for me. Our oldest brother left to live with Daddy when he was about 16, and then he joined the Marines. Our sister was wrapped up in a boyfriend and a job, then graduated from high school and went off to college. Our youngest brother left to live with our grandparents when he was about 16, and then - not to be outdone by big brother - he, too, joined the Marines.
What they all probably forget is that I was two years ahead of myself in school. I graduated from high school when I was 16. That's the good news. The bad news is, I couldn't get a driver's license until the end of summer before my junior year. Momma really liked for me to take her to work and pick her up. She didn't have to get out in bad weather and walk a long parking lot to get to a building. She got to spend twenty or minutes alone in the car with me every morning and every afternoon. I couldn't get a job until the end of summer before my senior year. Momma was working two jobs until my senior year.
I would go to school then go home. Alone. Just me and the TV. No computer back then, and certainly no Facebook or online games. Certainly no boyfriends. I was considered "jailbait" because I was so much younger that all of the other girls. No girlfriends to talk on the phone with - they were more "developed" than I was and proud of it. Having moved around as often as we did I made only one real friend in high school. She, though, had a major boyfriend and spent most of the time with him. High school was not a happy time for me. College was about the same - but at least I could go down to the dorm lobby and play Bridge with other human beings.
By this time I had learned to not be lonely. I learned how to be alone for hours and hours, but I wasn't sad or scared lonely.
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