If you can't tell by what you have read so far. We moved a lot and I still move a lot. I think somewhere in my mother's mind, it was what was supposed to happen. She was an air force brat and that was what she had to do as she grew up. My father was an officer in the air force so it just continued into her adult life. Honestly, it never went away. It wasn't until I was an adult myself into my 30s that I understood that Mom was moving to search. She was always looking for something better to make her happy.
My dad, Bud (not to be confused with my father-Dick) was an only child who loved the outdoors. He had spent most of his adult life living in Houston but wanted more. More space, more views, more time,.... just more. So while I was in the thick of invisible in the middle school years, my parents bought acreage about half way between Houston and San Antonio. I think they were "bitten" when our neighbors who had acreage and a weekend home outside of Moulton, TX invited us. The amount of time we spent there was not insignificant. We would walk, explore, swim in "tanks", catch grasshoppers and appreciate beautiful sunrises and sunsets. I think there were poker games, card games and fireflies.
So during those years, we too would traverse on the weekends. It was about a two hours drive each way and we would work to clear land, make an abandoned farm house habitable, work work work, eat really good food, listen to country music, work some more. When people meet me, they are usually surprised to know that I lived on a farm for four years and took weekend residence for a couple of years before that. The house was primitive at best with one working spigot stuck out of a wall, inches of dust and dirt in the attic, absolutely nothing close to air conditioning (not even ceiling fans), complete with an outhouse. While my dad was away one weekend, my mom thought she would surprise my dad and have us kids (aka slave labor) clean out the house. So here we were, 4 brothers and me, shoveling (literally) dirt out of an old farm house and sweeping and spraying a garden hose and sweeping and shoveling and spraying water all weekend. Maybe it was even a holiday weekend because I felt like the "fun" never ended. When we blew our nose in the evening it came out black. Farm house had no bathroom (yet) and maybe two bedrooms? Who could tell what was supposed to be a bedroom, etc. We later learned that my dad had intended on burning it to the ground. Even though it wasn't fun work, I am glad we did it. That experience and living in that house is part of me.
Fast forward a few years complete with a bathroom and a kitchen sink and Mom and Bud decide that we will move out there. "We" is actually my younger brother Matt, and myself. My parents would commute back and forth over the weekends and "we" would live in this house built the beginning of the 1900s with a stranger and attend a new school where were knew ONE person. Matt would start 7th grade and I would start 9th. This was moving from a suburban neighborhood where I graduated from eighth grade with a class of 300+ students to attending a high school where the class size was perhaps 25 and everyone there had known each other since birth. The counselor was also the principal. We had to argue with him that there was no need for me to take Homemaking as all the girls did because I had already taken two years of Homemaking. So, here I am in a town where I know no one and immediately placed into a situation where I am only with boys and not making friends that way. I was the first girl in Moulton High School to ever take Agriculture and I know I wasn't the last.
Let's just stop here and let that sink in. New small town (population about 1000), new micro small high school, no friends, living with my younger brother (let's keep in mind my role when he was in kindergarten) and a stranger, not even taking all my classes with the other girls almost all of whom had been together since kindergarten or sooner. There was also the prevalence of the Catholic Church across the street; most of the town's inhabitants were of German or Czech descent and Roman Catholic. I was none of these things.
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