"I do love this house! Look the daisies in the back yard are all in bloom!" Rodney and I were preparing ourselves to leave.

"You have worked awfully hard to get everything this nice," he told me and I knew how true that was.

"There’s all the refinishing furniture you did for a two-story house and that was a job. You sewed all those drapes of material from a fire sale. Even those chairs you upholstered are very nice." Rodney was testing my resolve to move.

"I know." I agreed with him. I shrugged my shoulders even as I remembered finding the dull grey fabric in a fire sale. After adding bleach to it the most beautiful gold came forth. Because the crepe like material hung so beautifully and since it was ten cents a yard I had enough to hang drapes from floor to ceiling for a dramatic effect in our living room.

"Fabric, furniture, things can be replaced. We have time. I’m sure it is necessary to do what has to be done for our baby."

Gradually, as carefully as we had begun to put plans and our lives together in this town so things were unwound as easily as anyone could unwind a ball of yarn simply by dropping it and watching it roll.

The hours spent with new friends would never be lost in our hearts and minds. The dancing, the laughter and the good times on the big old back porch was a memory sealed forever in our being. Besides, if boards could talk the floor might tell its own story of happy people enjoying life for only just one evening. From time to time over the years in the future, what is called the pipeline of friends, one story after another came to me.

The friend whose husband owned an equipment company made me a small pin cushion I always cherished. It was a vividly bright color of burnt red and only someone with Native American blood would truly appreciate it’s design. There were two small stuffed squares sewn at one corner to a length of ribbon so it could be thrown over a hook. I saved it and kept the ornament tucked away in a secure place. On the day and hour she died it was raining in our part of the world. One of the children must have filched the pin cushion from its hiding place and dropped it in the walk way which went around the side of our house. It was soaked through and through and I picked the bright object up from the dark murky puddle into which it fell. I didn’t know of her death at the time but dried it off while I was thinking of my friend from so long ago. Imagine how I felt when I realized she was gone and at the same time I had found her memory gift to me.

This was to happen so far in the future. At the present the decision was made, for sure, we would be moving on to what we believed would be a solution to the problem with our child. If I could walk away from the plains of the Osage, fragrant meadows, spacious uncluttered grounds and magnificent skies surely I would be able to leave this place.

"Will you watch Rhonda for a bit? I want to drive out to the country to say good-bye to some of our friends.

"Will do. Do you want me to go with you?" Rodney offered.

I knew his introvert self was being courteous and was sure he really didn’t want to go, so I told him I would go alone.

One by one, I visited the families I had grown to love in that short time. We said our good-byes and it was as if we knew this was not the ending of our acquaintance but was a separation only for the time being. Over the years we were destined to see each other for brief visits at the huge conventions all about the country. And though these were to be fleeting it was a way to pick up on unknown happenings in each of our lives.

As Al-Anon and AA speak of a God thing it was is as if we were fated to have our lives meshed together forever and so we parted with smiles, hugs, and sweet sorrow, to use the phrase another writer has already penned.

Someone might suspiciously asked if the author is trying to proselytize a certain religion. Not so, because every congregation of the Christian faiths are different. What one accomplishes in one facet another might totally fail but excel in some other phase of service. In other words the Norman congregation, somewhere in the early establishment of their make-up already had the foundation for success as far as building close relationships. Each Christian group is as different as the original congregations in Corinth and early day Christian association. Our moving about from town to town taught us that. The trick is to find the strengths and weakness of a society and abide with those strengths overlooking the weakness or better yet, working to help overcome the weaknesses.