Who are the people in your neighborhood

Family is important, but in my life there were other people equally as important while I was growing up.  People who weren't even really related to me, but only neighbors. 

The first was Aunt Jo and Uncle Ralph who lived next door to us from the time I was five until we moved away in sixth grade.  They weren't my real aunt and uncle, but back then that is what you called older people if you didn't say Mrs., or Mr..  Uncle Ralph was really my youngest brother's surrogate dad.  He taught him almost everything from how to live to how to hunt and Aunt Jo bought me my first bra.  They didn't have children of their own, but they had children who came to visit that we played with and one was my best friend through high school.

After we moved I met Miss Condell, a woman who was in her nineties and lived alone in the house next door to our new house.  Her home was a museum and her brother actually donated many things from his travels to the Illinois State Museum.  Today you can go back and visit the house they grew up in, but back then she was just a fascinating woman who took me into her world and told me stories about all the magical things in her house.

We moved many times, but just before my senior year in high school we moved to another town.  It was my mother's home town and I had lots of relatives there but it was still a wrench.  I spent a lot of time driving back and forth to be with my old best friend in Springfield and much of the rest with women who worked for my grandmother.  One of those was Millie Murphy, a woman who grew up in a log cabin, married a man from the Ozarks and had a very dramatic life.  She cooked friend green tomatoes before the movie, harvested a field of corn with me standing behind the tractor to weight down the picker, and her husband and son played country music and danced the old way in the evenings.

Millie taught me that it was possible to live a long and useful life even after losing her husband and all three of her children.  She made living alone simply an extension of life that was different.  Millie was a survivor.  She was strong!

Of course I had people in my family who taught me many important things too.  I was surrounded by strong women and my father, but these people outside it, who had no reason to take an interest in me, made a huge impression.