In 1949 I was eleven and just starting seventh grade and 4-H (Future Homemakers of America).  My father, pastor of a small-town Baptist church for several years, announced one day that he was accepting at position in Lincoln, Nebraska at the Back to the Bible Broadcasting Co. as a counselor. 

I was too young to know all the reasons he was dissatisfied with his pastorate or if they were with him, but he held a strong belief in the purity of faith and church, and therefore forbid all efforts to allow rummage sales, fund raisers and so on, all customary and enjoyable social gatherings by the ladies of the town.  He held that it went against the New Testament teachings against money-changing in the temple of God.

This move was hard for me for several reasons:  we left behind my beloved elderly great-aunt Amelia Hine, who had lived with us since before I was born, and I had to part with my dear yellow tiger cat, Sunshine.  During the move, most of my tattered childhood treasures mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again (Parents, don't DO this to your kids.  Their stuff is their stuff!).  (See a surprise subsequent explanation!)  I left my friends, so important to a pre-teenager, and the beautiful hills and wild beauty of western New York state for the dusty rolling plains of Nebraska. Initially we left behind my mother, confined to bed in the final stages of a difficult pregnancy with my sister Priscilla.

In an effort to make me easier to care for and give my spirits a boost, Mother sent me to the town beauty shop the day before we left, and had my thick long hair, previously confined in braids, cut short and fashionably permed with one of those old fashioned octopus-looking apparatuses that seemed as if it would electrocute one's entire head.

With a house rented for us by a future co-worker,  at the end of November Daddy, my two-year old brother Nathan and I started driving across country, trailer in tow,  just before the Artic winds plunged the Midwest into a blizzard.  True to form, my brother Nathan came down with a terrible cold the first day out and ran a fever most of the way. 

Late at night on December 4th we pulled into the outskirts of Lincoln, snow still falling, and laid up in a motel for the night.  As the snowflakes covered everything with a clean glistening mantle, I optimistically vowed it would be a new start for me, leaving my troubles, worries, problems and shortcomings behind.  Little did I know that it works in reverse at that age and especially in a new environment!   And a good thing, too, that I didn't foresee how hard it would really be.
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