My first memory is this, "Worms, worms." I was less than three years old and I wet my bed. My mother heard me crying and cleaned me up and put me in bed with my oldest brother, Everett. There was hole in his quilt and he had twirled the filling into strands that felt like worms. I guess he would play with the filling to comfort himself. It's strange where you find comfort when you are little and chaos reigns in your world. Laying in my brother's lap twirling the quilt worms was a comfort when my daddy was yelling at my mother to shut up that squalling child and come back to bed. My mother was gentle with me and paid him no attention, but my world and my brothers was not easy.

My mother and daddy had met in post-war Los Angeles when my mother was living with her sister and daddy was there too. They parked cars in a parking lot. I have a picture of Mother and Daddy outside my aunt's house and they are smiling and laughing. I never knew anything about their courtship. I have three pictures of my mother on her wedding day: two in my grandmother's front yard and one of Mother and Daddy in the house. They are beautiful and happy. I don't know when things went wrong, but they did.

My two brothers, Everett and Terry, were eleven months apart. I didn't come along until seven years later so we have very different memories being almost a generation apart. Both my parents came from big families, eleven children were in mother's family and twelve in my daddy's. They both grew up on farms. Mother in DeKalb County in Alabama and daddy in Egypt, Arkansas.

My grandaddy Everett was a master carpenter, a farmer, and at one time ran a dairy in Lebanon. Mother was born in their house in Fort Payne at the foot of Pine Ridge. Sometime in the 1930s, grandaddy bought the property in Rainsville that will forever be what we all think of as home. The house is built of rocks that he and my mother snaked out of Town Creek with a yoke of oxen. Many of the rocks are three or four feet tall and at least two feet wide. The walls are nearly a foot thick and rock inside and out. The floor is a little wavy as my grandaddy built his house on a rock that he dug out from the side of a small hill. There was a three foot walk around the house and on the back of the house the ground was about six feet high. The roof was flat concrete 4 inches thick. They say my grandaddy used to grow flowers on the roof. By the time I came along it had a gable roof on top and the screened porch had been taken in for another room forever called the front porch.

My Grandmother and Grandaddy Hufstedler lived in Pocahontas, Arkansas when they married and at some point moved to Egypt. There, they raised their children and share-cropped cotton. They lived in an old farmhouse and I don't remember being there as a child until I was fourteen and went to visit with Everett when my nephew was born.

Mother and Daddy divorced when I was three. Mother and us kids moved into Grandmother Everett's house and lived there until I was 12. The house wasn't very big...it had three small bedrooms and Everett and Terry slept in the attic. The house was warm in the winter from the fireplace and the big gas heater on the front porch, and cool in the summer. Those thick rock walls were all the insulation it needed, but Terry and Everett were not inside those thick walls. I'm sure they were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. There wasn't insulation in the attic at all.

I didn't know until after my mother died when I was 19 that mother and daddy were married twice. They got divorced and daddy went back to Egypt to live with his parents. My mother was "sick" sometimes and my uncles and grandmother took care of us kids. After my daddy left to go back to Arkansas, I never saw him again until he came to school to see us kids when I was in the fifth grade. He wanted us to go "for a ride" with him and I wouldn't go. I said if I didn't go home after school, mother would worry about us. I saw Everett and Terry ride off with him and I went back to Mrs. Armstrong's fifth grade class. That was the last time we saw Everett and Terry for several days. My mother was frantic when I told her they were with Daddy. Uncle Guice and Uncle Barnard called the sheriff and swore out a warrant for Daddy's arrest. They found him and my brothers at a friend of daddy's in Henagar. That was the last time I saw my daddy until I was fourteen.

So...in my really formative years I never really knew my daddy. I was priveleged to have my Uncle Guice and Uncle Barnard though. I never knew my mother, brothers, and I were poor until after I grew up. I didn't have all I ever wanted but I had everything I ever needed. Most of all I had the love of a big old family. Uncle Guice and Uncle Barnard never married. They took care of us and my grandmother. Uncle Barnard is 87 and still works several days a week. He still is visiting the sick and the poor and taking care of others. I am so blessed to have him.

Thanks to my family I am still...Living Life.