1965

1965:
This was the year that Richard crawled into our bedroom early one morning saying he couldn’t walk.  He ended up in Baylor Hospital for two weeks.  Two weeks is a long time when you are waiting for lab tests and doctors are telling you it may be false.  Except for childhood diseases and abrasions that was our first experience with illness severe enough to threaten life, and it shook us.  He got okay pretty quickly.  Just one move this year, to Neodesha.  That was a big move for us.  It meant a change of work for Dad, and a big geographical change.  We were optimistic and full of zeal and sort of dumb, and we packed up and moved to Kansas.  Cleo was part of the family by now—she and Russell were the same age—and she went to Kansas too.  So did a cat who went on a longer trip to Kitty Heaven soon after that.  Moving to Kansas was like going to another world.  We rented that big old house that everyone except Russell remembers.  Russell should remember mailmen and policemen, because they brought him home on several occasions when older siblings neglected to lock doors and he disappeared as fast as his fat little legs would carry him.  This house was home baked bread and wild grape jelly (The pictures of Russell covered and ecstatic) garden, plenty of fresh milk, and family time.  Dad was the preacher her, and spent a lot of time in his study.  Money was close, and when Christmas came, less than two months after we got there, no money was there to spend.  This Christmas, and the lack of money wasn’t all that important.  I can’t remember what sort of things I made, except for a doll bed for Nancy out of our old bedspread and a cradle for Amy—there is a picture in the book of me working on that.  Just before Christmas the Moutons (a family in the church) came and brought a bunch of toys and things their kids had outgrown, and that Christmas turned out to be a nice one—not just because the family was very much together here.