Just a small town girl wanting to encourage faith and hope in everyone I see.  With twelve brothers and sisters, I grew up number nine. Poor but so rich, I flew off for a college adventure in California and really never looked back…except to reminence once in a while of the fortune I had but truly never appreciated until I was much older. I think often of my small town and the friends I left there. Dayville was an East Coast town that didn’t seem to grow much more than a thousand. We lived in walking distance to a train track and old button factory that my brothers and sisters and I would frequently scour and dig around for rustic buttons that my mom would use to sew. The four seasons there were perfect. Spring time was beautiful, the budding trees were amazing, Connecticut was known for their tall full Oak trees. The summers were scorching hot, often I remember running bare feet across hot pavement to play kickball with all the neighborhood kids who had gathered to take on the Odum clan. At night we would use fans in open windows to give us a cool breeze. Fall left the hugest leaf piles a child could dream of, often we’d rake up a high pile and jump, burying ourselves in the rough brittle leaves, laughing and carrying on, and then creating the most human like scarecrows we could imagine. Winters left neatly piled wood on the front porch so we could keep our wood stoves burning, snow drifts would sometimes be waste high and the tobogganing down steep hills leaving us at the bottom of the hill in a huge human heap were a part of winter, as well as iceskating on the pond at Owen Bell Park. These are some of my fondest memories. But I flew off leaving those memories behind like a freight train headed on a mission to deliver cargo to a distant city. Life was sweet!