By the end of that year, when we moved to Miami Ok., I was eight months pregnant.  I think every animal on the farm was pregnant.  We had bought ten acres to hold the cow, and all the animals and give Pat a place to ride the horse.  One day after Ken had gone to work and the kids had caught the bus to school, the horse got out and went trotting down the road with me in close pursuit chasing it with a broom.  I had no idea how to catch a horse or what to do with it if I caught it.

Luckily, a passing farmer took pity on me.  He stopped and corralled the horse, put it back in the barn and told me I probably shouldn't be chasing horses in my condition.  Which I knew, but what else was I supposed to do.  I am definitely not a farm girl.  Even though I was barefoot and pregnant.

Ken hadn't wanted to move to Miami anyway.  But I thought we should live where he had a job-- so he wouldn't have a fifty mile commute every day--both ways.  We had been drug all over America while he was in the Corps--which was fine.  However, the houses we lived in had concrete streets, sometimes on two sides.  But farm life?  Dirt.  Every imaginable kind of poop that I invariably stepped in.  It just wasn't for me.

I tried--because Pat wanted to live on a farm.  But when Pat got beat up in the girl's bathroom at school, and Becky came home crying (Becky never cries) because she made the cheerleading squad--knocking off one of their regulars and making all the other girls gang up on her, well, that was it.  We had never experienced friction like that.  It was a tough town back in the sixties.  And we had lived in enough towns to know tough when we saw it.  I told Ken that I had been wrong, that we should have stayed where we were; we never should have moved.  He agreed, but didn't say, "I told you so." 

But when Becky said, "I want to go home," Ken said, "Put this place on the market.  Let's go home."  So we did.  And God willing, I will never live in the country again. 

Concrete.  You've got to love it.