I was born in western Nebraska where the miserable wind blew sage brush across the sanddunes in summer and created snow blizzards in winters. The month before my eighth birthday, in August of 1943, my father moved his family to the warm Ozarks where he'd bought a lush, green farm, a place he proclaimed to be "God's promised land."
The possessions we didn't sell in our livestock sale we shipped by train to our new location. Then Papa loaded up my five brothers in an old pickup with a hand-built box on the back. We five girls climbed into mom's car and headed down our sandy lane. We were moving to Arkansas.
The entire trip took about two weeks. I don't remember many difficulties along the way, but I'm sure we had the usual amount of breakdowns, flat tires, overheated engines and bad roads. Joy, my baby sister, was only a few weeks old. During the heat of the day my parents would stop, parking under a cool shade tree, so they could lay her down on a mattress in the box-trailer for her afternoon nap. The rest of us would explore the unfamiliar countryside.
One night my dad, with my mother following close behind, pulled into the yard of an old abandoned house. We kids tumbled out into the weed infested yard and began exploring while mom fixed supper. Just as we were about to eat our meal a police car drove up. We had never been that close to a policeman in our entire lives. Papa spoke with him for some time out by the police car. Finally they both came over to where we sat around a makeshift table. The policeman explained that we were trespassing and would have to leave. "Go ahead and finish your supper," he told us. Later we drove on down the highway until we found a free campground along side the road near the Platte River.
My father was a stern man, but I noticed the further down the road we went the happier he became. Perhaps he was thinking of a few years earlier when he'd brought his 15-year old bride-to-be to Fayetteville where they were married. He kept telling us kids, "The people in Arkansas are SO friendly."
One day I changed places with my brothers and rode beside papa in the pickup. He began waving at everyone he saw. They would just stare at us and few waved back. They probably wondered what kind of hillbillies were invading their country.
We arrived at our destination, nine miles west of Gravette, late at night, hungry and tired. Not having phones we'd had no way of informing the previous owners when we would arrive. But they were quite hospitable and fed us and let us explore our new two-story farm house, though we had to live in our box trailer for a few days until they could move out.
One of the first people we met was John Poyner. He owned the only filling station in
Southwest City, just over the Missouri border. We likely met him as we drove through town and filled up with gas. We often filled our vehicles from the station's glass tanks. Even after they got modern pumps Poyner always displayed one of those glass tanks out front, with a price of 29 cents a gallon.
Two new sisters born in the Ozarks gave our parents an even dozen children. How we loved roaming over the soft grass and wading the cool streams full of crawdads and turtles and a few snakes, where the weather never got too windy or too cold.
Years later I took my first trip back to Nebraska with my husband. We drove on paved roads in an air conditioned car and stayed at a modern motel - a trip that took two days. Oil wells stood on the sight where our house had once been. (Unfortunately we hadn't retained the mineral rights.) I walked out on a sandy knoll, watching carefully for rattle snakes, and dug up a small cactus. I brought it home and planted it in my yard in the corner of Northwest Arkansas, the place I've never left.