Preface

From a young age, I wanted to pursue a life of adventure.

When I was five years old, I searched for buried treasure and hunted bears in the woods near our home with my cap pistol.

As a ten-year-old, I devoured library books full of other people’s adventures.

When I was forty-two, I fulfilled my lifelong dream: Adventure among the stars.

In 1957, when I was in high school, the Russians put the first artificial satellite into orbit. Our first US astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were selected in 1959. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space the year that I graduated high school: he completed one orbit of Earth on April 12, 1961. Alan Shepard followed shortly, piloting Freedom 7 to the edge of space on May 5, 1961. Those flights began the race to the moon.

After reading and hearing about all those great adventures, I decided I wanted to pursue a path that might lead me to join the explorers in this new frontier of space. I didn’t care how improbable that might be. I saw it as my great adventure.

And it was.

There were many difficult steps along the way, each requiring a lot of hard work and good luck. Some were full of danger, bringing me to death’s door. Others initially proved so difficult for me to master that they seemed impossible. None were easy, and any misstep could derail my quest.

My family, including my parents, grandparents, and relatives, helped shape me into the man I became — one who could succeed despite the extreme challenges of becoming an astronautics engineer, USAF fighter pilot and test pilot, NASA astronaut, USAF Major General, and NASA Center Director. They each lived lives of love and service. I admired them and their sacrifices for me as I matured.

In this book, I share my journey with you and show how each member of my family contributed to my success.

They helped me become an improbable astronaut.

Book 1: The Quest

Section 1: Formative Years

Chapter 1: Early Memories

1943 and beyond

The year of my birth was in most ways the worst year in history. Our nation was fighting in World War II (WWII) on two fronts, in Europe and the Pacific, with no end in sight. Millions were dying, and here I was, just entering the world, my journey just beginning.

First impressions

My earliest memory is of lying on a cold, hard table in the local hospital at three years of age, looking up. I remember these old, Gothic windows that made it seem like I was in some kind of a cavern, looking way up at some light. I felt icy hands touching my chest and neck.

An infected flea had bitten me while I was playing in the sandbox in the yard, and I developed typhus fever. Typhus was a dangerous illness for young children back then, and there were no effective treatments or vaccine for it during WWII — just aspirin and cold compresses to lower my dangerously high fever. Antibiotics to treat it effectively were not commercially available until years later. At this writing in 2021, there is still no vaccine to prevent it.

I don’t remember much of my stay in the hospital. I was suffering from a high fever. I don’t recall any other aches and pains, but I could tell from the attention I was getting that I was in danger. Although my mother and doctors were with me, I felt alone, staring up at that high ceiling, feeling so tiny in such a large space. Like I was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and looking down into the abyss, or staring down at the Earth from hundreds of miles high in space.

Roy’s first photo with mother, Elizabeth, in October 1943

Grandparents

Grandpappy and Granny Rose

My next memory was waking on a small cot next to my parents’ bed in my Grandpappy Bridges’s home and seeing a lot of get-well cards from concerned friends and relatives pinned to the wall above my cot. I had been discharged from the hospital after a week. My grandpappy — Dr. Bridges — continued to treat me while I recuperated fully over the next week. After that, I was allowed out of bed, and life returned to normal.

Until the age of five, I grew up in their home. It was a two-story house, and the front room was his office where Grandpappy met and treated patients, and my grandmother, Granny Rose, worked alongside him. I grew up watching my grandfather treat many patients. They often had nothing to give him in return except ham and chickens, which he happily took as payment.

When I was just three or four years old, Grandpappy would take me with him on house calls. I don’t know why he did it, but I suspect that it was to give my grandmother a break from watching me while my mother worked. I thought riding with him was fun, and he was always kind to me. I wasn’t always nice to him. He would leave his ball of chewing tobacco on the car door handle, and I delighted in knocking it off into the dirt.

Looking back on my time traveling with him and observing him treating patients in his home or during house calls, I was impressed by his work ethic and professionalism. He worked around the clock when necessary, and his work was his hobby. He cared deeply for his large family, including my parents and me. He extended his hospitality to us by inviting us to live with him until my parents could save enough money to purchase a home.

Grandpappy Bridges initially started his practice in a rural community of North Georgia, making house calls using a two-horse wagon. Because of the distance to his patients, he would have to stay with them during the most severe medical crises, resulting in many long days away from the family.

To advance in his rural practice he moved to areas with larger populations several times over the years. After suffering a bout of typhoid fever and mumps, as well as a mysterious ailment similar to sleeping disease, he gave up his rural practice and moved to East Atlanta in 1922 or 1923 when he was fifty-three or fifty-four. He practiced there for over twenty-five years, specializing in treating typhoid fever and pneumonia. He also delivered over three thousand babies and cared for them as a pediatrician until he was forced to retire in the late 1940s due to heart disease. Locating his practice in Atlanta meant that he did not have to travel so far to render care on house calls, and hospitals were readily available to treat severe illnesses.

Father, Roy Bridges, in the Army Air Corps during WWII

Great-Granny Lucy

Given how young I was, I needed some parent-like guidance. My mom was always working at the hospital, and my dad was off working in the army in my earliest years. After WWII was over and Dad was home with us again, he worked at a large wholesale hardware store. Grandpappy was out on house calls or treating patients in the office, and Granny Rose helped him. I needed to stay out of the way.

So Granny Lucy, Granny Rose’s mother, would visit often, and she became my caregiver and playmate during her frequent visits. I was lonely, and I loved it when she visited. She often stayed for several days, and she made an impression on me even though I was only between three and five years old. She engaged me and kept me occupied with activities and stories.

Granny Lucy had a colorful personality, a real life force. She had an interesting background. I learned about it later in life, and it impressed me.

She was born in 1854, eloped at age fifteen, and was married at the Jug Tavern in Winder, Georgia. She and her husband traveled in a covered wagon to a campground at Stone Mountain and camped for their honeymoon.

Once, early in their marriage, her husband came home a little too tipsy after a boys’ night out. She kicked him out of the house, barred the doors, and guarded them with a shotgun. He spent the night outside and never came home drunk again.

When she was sixty-three, long before I was born, she was kicking up her heels and dancing with her granddaughter when she fell and broke her hip. She refused to go to the hospital and had to use crutches and a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Although she couldn’t dance anymore, she still had a high-energy personality and exuded optimism and excitement no matter what she was doing.

One of her favorite activities was making silk quilts, which were simply beautiful works of art. She always invited me to help as she arranged colors and shapes from her large collection of scrap materials. I still have one of her masterpieces; it reminds me of what a life force she was. She lived to be 101. My dad lived to be 102, so I assume that he inherited the longevity gene from her.

Granny Lucy at her 90th Birthday Party in 1944

One of Granny Lucy’s quilts

Grandaddy and Grandmother Roberson

Holidays

My mother’s parents were Edgar and Esther Roberson of Screven, Georgia. Grandaddy Edgar Roberson was a carpenter and a farmer. When he was young, he sang in a barbershop quartet. Grandmother Esther Roberson was a music teacher.

Holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, were spent with my mother’s extended family at her parents’ home in southern Georgia. That was a really big deal, and they made a habit of doing that all during my childhood. On Christmas Eve, my grandfather would lead us around his farm to select and harvest a Christmas tree, which we decorated in the evening. Of course, Christmas mornings were always filled with excitement as we discovered what Santa had left under the tree. Santa’s presents were not wrapped; we could see everything instantly as we entered the room.

Grandmother and Mom worked all morning to prepare a feast. They were joined by an African American lady named Minnie, who lived nearby. She was part of the family for these gatherings every year.

Around noon, the relatives from Jacksonville and Savannah would arrive. Everyone brought wrapped presents that went under the tree. Some brought delicious cakes and pies. The dining table was expanded with leaves to its maximum size to accommodate the adults. We kids sat with our cousins at a card table. After a delicious meal of roast turkey and many side dishes, we delighted in the bounty of desserts. The adults’ conversations were filled with laughter. We kids also had a great time catching up on each others’ adventures.

After dinner, we all gathered in front of the fireplace in the living room. Presents that our relatives had brought were passed out, and we tore into them to discover what was inside.

My aunts and uncles in Mom’s extended family were always generous to my sisters and me with their gifts of toys and clothing. Listening to their stories about their lives and work, I imagined that they had much richer experiences than I did living on the farm. They worked in interesting jobs and lived in big cities, yet they showed an interest in me.

Growing up in affluent urban areas, my cousins had more advantages than I had. Rather than being envious, I just liked hanging out with them and hearing about their experiences. And after all the presents had been opened, my cousins, my sisters, and I would often get into some kind of mischief in the yard or barn. Being included in a large family who gathered often and enjoyed sharing and supporting each other made me feel warm and loved.

Summers

Every year, starting after my fourth birthday, my folks left my sister Eva Mae and me with our grandparents after the July Fourth holiday for an extended visit. My grandfather’s eighty-acre farm was in Screven, in south Georgia, about forty miles from the seacoast. His three brothers and their families lived on adjacent farms carved out of the homestead when their father died.

We were fortunate to have a cousin, my grandfather’s niece who was my age, living on the adjacent farm and within a short walking distance. We often met to play. We delighted in playing games of kick-the-can, or board games such as Monopoly or Clue when we had to hide from the sun from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. to avoid sunburns in those days before sunscreens.

One favorite activity was going swimming in the afternoon. Granddaddy had a swimming hole formed on his property when he allowed the county to excavate clay to repair the local roads. The water table was high, and the clay hole filled with fresh water. He built us a diving board. My sister, my cousin, and I spent many hours swimming and playing in that rustic swimming pool.

Once we got older, we could occasionally go to a nearby river to swim. Our great-uncles chaperoned these river trips; they had cars and my maternal grandparents did not. Some afternoons we would jump in the back of the pickup truck and they would haul us over to Jekyll Island for some beach time.

My grandparents and I developed a very special relationship. The year before I started school, when I was spending the summer in south Georgia with them, we got the letter telling us that Grandpappy Bridges had died. Grandmother took me out on the steps at the side of the house and read the letter to me. Of course I was sad to lose him; he had been part of my life. But I was so young when I knew him that I was not able to form the same degree of closeness with him as I developed with Granddaddy and Grandmother Roberson.

Given such experiences — holidays, summer vacations, spending my second-grade year with them — I was a frequent traveler with my maternal grandparents.

Chapter 2: Testing My Boundaries

Age 5–7

Our family outgrew our one-room apartment at Grandpappy and Granny Bridges’s home after my sister Eva Mae was born. My grandparents’ bedroom was on the other side of the house from the great room that served as the office where they received and treated patients, separated from it by a foyer and heavy wooden sliding doors in the bedroom doorway. We had the big bedroom, which was upstairs — just one room, with a bathroom down the hallway.

When I was five years old, my folks bought a home in Lithonia, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The two-bedroom house was called a garage apartment. The living quarters were upstairs. A garage and laundry room were on the first floor.

In addition to more room for our growing family, it helped my dad get a more stable and productive job than working in a hardware store. The garage apartment was next to a one-story workshop on the property; its proximity allowed him to start his own business repairing automotive parts.

Loaded for bear

Moving to our new home in Lithonia, Georgia, was exciting because I had opportunities for adventures in the area around our garage apartment home. Dad had a large workshop in a separate building where he rebuilt automobile generators and starters. To get to it, we had to go through the woods parallel to the highway, which ran in front of our house and his shop for several hundred feet.

Behind our house and the shop, the woods covered many acres. I loved to imagine hunting for bears in those woods with my cap pistol, but I wasn’t allowed to do it unless accompanied by my mom or dad. They feared that I would become lost in the underbrush.

True, the underbrush was extremely thick. You could imagine that you heard something rustling around in there. I’d pull my cap pistol out and shoot at it, then we’d go running in there to see if we had shot a bear. Of course there was never any bear there. Just like there was never any buried treasure, although I imagined my sister could somehow clairvoyantly point me to it.

My sister, Eva Mae, who was two and a half years younger than I, was my constant companion on my adventures. She helped me search for buried treasure by playing guide and divining where I should dig. We never found any, but the hunts were fun, and we continued to believe that we would eventually uncover the mother lode.

One day I wanted to go bear hunting, but Mom was busy washing clothes and couldn’t go with me. I wasn’t in the mood to be denied my fun, so I quietly locked her in the garage, exited the house with my sister, and went anyway.

My mother, Elizabeth Roberson Bridges, grew up in Screven, Georgia, the middle child of five. She graduated from Piedmont Hospital Nursing School in Atlanta, Georgia, when she was twenty-one and then worked as a Registered Nurse at the Piedmont Hospital, where she gave birth to me in 1943. Mom was the ultimate professional nurse, and for the rest of her nursing career she worked in a hospital and later on ran a clinic for a textile mill, giving hearing tests and first aid for on-the-job injuries that didn’t require a doctor. She was tough; I think that anybody who met my mother would say she was sort of a lady of steel. On this particular day, I seriously underestimated her.

I foolishly thought that I could get away with it, since she was busy with chores. I really wanted to go hunt bears, and she didn’t have time for it. So I thought if we were really quiet and just snuck outside of the garage, where she was doing laundry, we could pull it off. After all, it was going to take a while; this was back in the days where laundry wasn’t just a push of a button. You had to put it through a ringer and all, so I thought, well, she’s busy. She won’t notice. She didn’t have any need to go outside; she could just go back up the stairs to the living area without finding out that the door was locked.

Except that, when I left, I made sure that the downstairs door that led upstairs was locked as well. So the only way she could feasibly get out was to break down that garage door. I was sure we could go hunt bears for a while and go back home and everything would be just fine.

We hunted and pretended to shoot at bears on the way through the woods to Dad’s shop. After we visited with him for a while, he became suspicious; he knew that we shouldn’t be there without Mom. He insisted on escorting us back to the house. I didn’t want him to go and tried to talk him into just letting Eva Mae and me go home on our own. He didn’t buy it.

I tried my best to divert my dad by trying to get him to help me find some bears on the way. I kept pointing out likely spots to look that would take us off of a direct path, but he just kept us moving forward.

I prayed that Mom had not noticed that we had locked her inside and left. After all, I told myself, she was busy, and we were quiet as we began our adventure. We had been away for less than half an hour. Maybe she just stayed busy with her chores and didn’t try to get out. I knew that she could get pretty angry with me when I was naughty, so I prayed for the alternative.

As we exited the woods I saw the house and my irritated mother standing outside the garage door. The garage door had been ripped from its hinges and was lying on the ground. She had one hand mounted on her hip and a hairbrush in the other, ready to deliver a whipping.

The whipping hurt.

Playing with fire

Not long after that, we were visiting my grandparents’ home in Atlanta, and I set off on another adventure with Eva Mae. We went on a fantasy camping trip in the enormous crawl space under their home, which was filled with tunnels that opened at the top, containing the various plumbing pipes. To my mind, it was a cave that needed to be explored.

It was a very large crawl space. The house was on a steeply sloping back yard that flattened out when it got to the back of the house, opening up the space as you got towards the bottom, where we could walk upright. After exploring for a while, we set up a campsite. We built a small campfire, using scrap wood and old newspapers left there by the people who built the house, and pretended to cook dinner.

I knew that building the fire was wrong, but I was just too caught up in my fantasy to worry about it. No one else ever went down there. There were very few windows in the back of the house where they could have seen smoke. It was just a little fire. A few sticks, a bit of paper. Not a bonfire. Just enough to fuel the imagination.

We eventually put out the fire and returned to civilization, but I failed to warn Eva Mae to keep her mouth shut about our adventure. As soon as she saw Mom, she excitedly told her about our camping trip. When Mom learned that we had built a fire under the house, she got her hairbrush and gave me another lesson in what not to do on my adventures.

Walk down that lonesome road

After that, I became somewhat more conscious of safety on my adventures — but I still made mistakes. I started the first grade and rode the school bus to and from school. I had to find something to do in the schoolyard for an hour as I waited for the second bus route.

One day I was standing on the corner of the schoolyard, watching the teenage crossing guard. The crossing guard thought I was waiting to cross the street, and he insisted that I do so. So I did. I didn’t want to appear foolish by trying to cross back to the schoolyard, so I decided to just continue walking the several miles home. The walk was on the shoulder of a busy two-lane highway with no sidewalk. When I finally made it home and proudly announced my feat, I got another memorable whipping.

By this time her hairbrush and I were well acquainted.

Hog wild

During my summer vacation with grandparents when I was six, Eva Mae and I went with Granddaddy to feed the pigs one evening before supper. The pigpen was just across the dirt road that ran by the side of the house. I had helped Granddaddy many times with this chore before. The pigs seemed tame and unthreatening. There were a dozen or so small piglets in the pen, and I wanted to make one my pet and play with it. On that evening, I decided that I would catch one.

When Granddaddy finished feeding the pigs, he took Eva Mae’s hand and started walking back to the house. I stayed by the pigpen, and they didn’t notice. After they went into the house, I climbed over the fence and stalked a cute little piglet, which was all by itself about twenty feet from the rest of the larger pigs. The big pigs were busy eating and didn’t notice my stealthy approach.

I pinned the piglet against the fence and caught it. My piglet wasn’t pleased and started squealing loudly. I was bent over at the waist as I tried to hold the pig. I happened to look between my legs and saw a several-hundred-pound mother pig and her sisters charging me to protect her baby. The mother and her sisters knocked me to the ground and started chewing on me. Fortunately, Granddaddy heard all of the noise the pigs were making and came to my rescue before they killed me. I had to go to the hospital for stitches and a tetanus shot.

I still have the scars on my buttocks to remind me of that lesson: all farm animals can be dangerous if not treated with respect.

The shape of things to come

I liked testing my boundaries. I think it says something about why I stretched to the point of flying a rocket into space. I kept pushing those boundaries all the way up through that time period.

Testing boundaries has been part of my nature, a constant in my life. For example, on a test program on a brand-new airplane, the Stall/Post-stall/Spin program was pushing the airplane out to its most extreme boundaries to see what would happen. How else could we help other people who inadvertently got into that situation figure out how to get out of it safely?

I think that was what I was doing, even as a kid. I just needed to learn to do it safely. My mom and grandfather knew they couldn’t be there every time that I stretched my boundaries and were trying to help me learn safe limits without taking away my sense of adventure.

I was a slow learner.

School days

I didn’t go to preschool or kindergarten. I started first grade in Lithonia when I was six. First grade was fun and interesting. I quickly mastered reading and writing despite having no early schooling. It would have been perfect except for being bullied because of my name.

My name was Roy Dubard Bridges, Jr. My family called me by my middle name, Dubard. It was also my dad’s middle name, given to him in honor of the nurse who had assisted his mother at his birthing. My family called me Dubard so that there would be no confusion when they addressed me when Dad was nearby.

But that name was a problem at school. My classmates called me Dobug or some other variation of my strange middle name. I didn’t like the bullies who did it, and I started fights at recess to make them stop tormenting me. I demanded that my classmates call me by my first name, Roy. My family started calling me Butch to let me know when I was being addressed instead of my father. Fortunately, I changed schools after the first grade, which put the bullying in my past.

During the summer between my first and second grade, Dad was suffering from a serious lung disease caused by the severe pollution from coal smoke in Atlanta and smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes. They planned to move our family to the Bridges family farm near Pendergrass, Georgia, before the start of school for my third-grade year, to get Dad as far away as possible from the polluted air in Atlanta to aid in his recovery from illness. Granny Rose had given them permission to occupy the Bridges farm and make their living from it.

Meanwhile, they didn’t want to move me to another school halfway through the year. Instead of uprooting me, they arranged for me to live with my grandparents in Screven for a year and attend school there for the second grade. My sister Eva Mae was not yet in school, and Mom was pregnant with my sister Nancy. They planned to join me at my grandparents’ farm after Nancy was born in February and they’d had time to sell our garage apartment home.

I was delighted to spend more time with Granddaddy and Grandmother Roberson. Having spent a lot of time with them during my many visits, I was confident that all would go well. I knew Granddaddy was a quiet, supportive coach, and I looked forward to spending the year with him as my guardian. I would miss my parents, but I knew it would only be a few months before they moved into my grandparents’ home with me.

I have good memories of that second-grade year, despite the lack of many conveniences in my grandparents’ home. It wasn’t connected to electricity; the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) had not arrived in that area yet. So I studied by kerosene lantern in the evenings. The main bedroom was heated by kerosene stove, but mine lacked heat. Grandmother cooked on a woodstove in the kitchen and used steel irons heated on the stove for ironing clothes. On really cold nights, she would wrap a heated iron in a towel and stick it in my bed near my feet. There was no indoor toilet or shower, so I bathed in a large tin tub that was manually filled with warm water. I helped with farm and household chores before and after school.

In the spring, Mom and Dad moved in with my two sisters. Nancy was born just before they arrived. Mom got a job as a nurse at the hospital in the nearby town of Jesup. She hired an African American woman, a relative of their friend Minnie, to help care for Nancy, which included being a wet nurse. Dad was an understudy to Granddaddy on planting and caring for crops, to prepare him to take over operating the Bridges farm the summer after my second grade.

This was my first lesson on learning to endure hardships and discovering that I wanted to do something other than farming.

Chapter 3: Living on the Farm

Age 8 until high school

Prior to the start of my third-grade school year, we moved to the family farm in Pendergrass. My Grandpappy Bridges had inherited the farm after his dad died. He settled with the other heirs so that he was sole owner. He didn’t farm the land, but the sharecropper family did, and they shared in the earnings from cotton crops. When he died, Granny Rose inherited it. She offered to let my father move to the farm and operate it.

The sharecropper’s extended family was living in the main farmhouse on the hill, and the sharecropper’s mother and father lived in the smaller auxiliary home nearby on the property. We lived in a large canvas tent over a wooden floor during the summer and early fall. During the summer, we left the tent sides rolled up to provide better ventilation and cooling,

On one of the first nights in the tent, I noticed a strange shape in the field. It looked like a big bear. It was just the hulk of a big tree that had died, and in the twilight, it looked like a grizzly bear standing up with its arms out, but I hoped there were no real bears lurking out there. I was old enough by then to know you don’t mess around with bears.

Another night I woke up to find something warm and fuzzy next to me on my cot. At first, I was so frightened that my chest tightened, making it difficult to breathe. Then I heard the purring and relaxed. It was a small kitten curled up on my chest and not the dangerous animal that I had imagined had crawled into bed with me.

Roy’s elementary school photo, probably third grade

My mother got a job as a nurse at the hospital in Winder and later at the larger Hall County Hospital in Gainesville. My father went to school on the G.I. Bill to learn more about modern farming techniques. He turned a dilapidated house on the property, an almost falling-in wreck of a house with a roof that was partially collapsed, into a weatherproof, one-room home for us before winter arrived. He braced the roof up, so it wouldn’t be a danger, and installed a sort of picture window — it wasn’t fancy, just a wall of regular windows, but it was big. We had electricity, a kerosene stove and oven, and a woodstove for heat, but no other amenities.

It was just one room — just kitchen and bedroom for my parents as well as us kids. It was about the size of a large tent, but it kept the cold air out, and we could have heat in the wintertime. The toilet was an outhouse — something that would continue to be true for years to come.

New school

Because of some delays in moving from South Georgia and getting our tent home set up, I was a few days late joining my third-grade classmates at the Pendergrass Elementary School, which was in a small, two-story brick building. There were two grades per classroom, a small auditorium upstairs, and a small cafeteria with picnic tables downstairs. Meals were cooked on a woodstove, and students took turns chopping wood for it. Potbellied coal stoves heated classrooms. Restrooms were in detached outhouses on the back edge of the school grounds.

I was overwhelmed on my first day at this new school. My father introduced me to the combined third- and fourth-grade class. I had become shy. I didn’t like being the center of attention. Speaking in front of a group of strangers was frightening.

That morning, everyone was looking at my dad when he said my name. Thinking I was supposed to say something, I was just frozen. I let the pressure get to me and broke down, which was humiliating. To release the stress, I let out a sob or two.

Shyness was a personality trait that stayed with me until high school. It was so bad that until I was in high school, I would never ask a question in class. Ever. It was unnerving to speak out.

But apparently, there were still some risks that I was willing to take. Once while in the third grade, I stole some cigarettes from my father and took them to school with me. I had them in my book bag when I arrived at the field where we got off the bus to help my parents with chores. When I excused myself to go into the woods to relieve myself, I decided to have a smoke. To my horror, I saw my mom and dad enter the woods as I was squatting and smoking. They had seen the plume of smoke rising out of the small copse of woods and had come to investigate. After that incident, I was often referred to by the nickname Smokey Joe.

New home

During the spring and summer of our second year on the farm, my parents constructed what was intended to become the two-car garage of our new ranch style farmhouse. The foundation was made of local stones that we harvested from around the farm. This was given a top coating of concrete for the floor.

There were three rooms in our new home. The main room