These are the memories of A Place in Time, of a young girl growing up in rural Tennessee, in the mid forties and early fifties. It was thirteen miles from the nearest town on a gravel road, very near the Tennessee River. It was a very beautiful area, but also very remote. She was one of eight children with a mother and dad, who loved them very much. They struggled very hard in the post-depression years but things seemed to improve in the early fifties. They all worked very hard, either picking or chopping cotton. Sometimes they would work from sunup to sundown. This family was also very blessed to never go hungry, because their mother raised a large garden and canned abundantly so they would have plenty for winter. They also had plenty of milk and butter from a cow they kept. They had an abundance of good times. They did lots of playing ball and other games outside, went swimming a lot and at night, there was always the ghost stories. Opal embarked on a great adventure at only seventeen years of age. She was chosen to attend a training class at a large insurance company in Nashville. This was because she was third in her graduating class and had excellent typing skills. She then became a key punch operator which was the beginning of the computer age. Needless to say her life changed dramatically. She moved to a very large house on West End Avenue. This was a boarding house with ten girls. What followed in the next two years was learning how the other half lived. Later four of the girls moved into an apt. This was just a few months before Opal met her intended. She was at a “Y” dance, one of her passions, when from across the crowded room, this Air Force sergeant, approached her to dance. The rest is history. He was from Minnesota, which was a minor problem, but the biggest obstacle he overcame immediately. He seemed to really click and fit into her family. This was no one on her list of life partners. After moving to Minnesota, having three children and living a somewhat contented life with all the cold and snow, twelve years later they decided to move back to Tennessee in l968. Opal’s life still had an empty spot, but some years later God opened her heart to His Love, and then her real life began. |