August 18 was my wedding anniversary.  Fifty-nine years ago I was so young.  Just starting a life with Ken.  I was so naive.  I had lived in Pryor all my life.  Other than going to Arkansas and Missouri to visit relatives, I had never been anywhere.  Pryor is a small town.  I knew everyone, everyone knew me.

I thank God for letting me grow up there.  It was Eden.  Everyone went to church.  We were for the most part Methodists, Baptists, or Church of God, with a scattering of other denominations.  On mother's day, we wore a red rose to church if our mother was living.  Children could walk home from school. The postman stopped to talk; the milkman put glass bottles of milk on the porch--that froze in the winter and popped the paper cap off--and up--two or three inches into the air.  Oleo was delivered--white--with a little yellow dye pellet inside for you to color it with.  It was probably lard.

I was born and spent my early years under the specter of World War II.  It was all I knew.  Everyday when we all  came home, someone would turn on the news to find out what happened that day overseas.  (No TV back then.)  If you had a dime, you went to the movies on Saturday, and the "shorts" would be footage of the war.   Announced by "Duh-dee-duh, diddile-diddle-dee-duh-tah-duh."  You got to go to the front lines--at the movies--every week.  War news was everywhere you turned.  Churchill and Roosevelt were a well known part of our lives.  The whole nation was united in the war effort.  Everything was rationed.  It was all normal to me, because that was all I had ever known.

The draft was always looming--but many, many joined the military because they wanted to fight.

When the war was finally over, nothing was ever the same.  Women, who had filled the jobs that men had left when they went to war--including my mom--didn't want to go back to the role they had previously held as housewives.   We were the last generation raised with a full-time mom at home.  We were all so blessed.  You don't know what you have until you don't have it any more.