One Thing After Another

Rose Marie Arthur

Copyright © 2019 by Rose Marie Arthur

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Precious Moments Small Hands Bible, New King James Version. Edited by Thomas Nelson. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Inc., 1982.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

A Piece of Heaven on Earth

Home, Church, Sundays, and Neighbors: Those were the Days

This Is My Father

This Is My Mother

These Are My Brothers

Growing Up

Getting Older

Nothing like Friends

Entertainment

Christmas at Home, My Stuff, and My Bedroom

Growing Pains

Pets: Wanted and Unwanted

Junior High and High School

Jobs and College Days

Engagement and Wedding

The Honeymoon

Welcome Home

Married Life: Not at All What I Expected

Baby Number 1

Bittersweet

About the Author

Acknowledgements

I want to thank, first and foremost, our dear Heavenly Father. I dedicate this book to Him. May all glory, honor and praise be His forever and ever.

For my parents, who are no longer here. I was so lucky to have you as my parents. You were the best parents in the world. I love and miss you both immensely.

I want to thank my daughter for helping me type the book and my other daughter for helping me express what I would like for the cover of the book. I would also like to thank my husband for the technical support and for all the other support given in this process. It would not have been possible without everyone’s help and support. Thank you so much!

I want to thank Lisa Bolen, my literary agent, Shannon Vernier and Nicole Hepak, my publication specialists, and everyone at Christian Faith Publishing Company for all of your time and work in helping me make this book possible. I couldn’t have done it without all of you.

For anyone who I have hurt throughout my lifetime, I am truly sorry. I hope peace, love, and joy for you all. I also forgive all of those who have trespassed against me.

I want everyone to know that what is written in this book is my story, feelings, and what has happened in my life, the good and the bad. It is only explaining what I have gone through with my life. This book is not intended to put anyone down. It is being written to help others who are suffering in any way, shape, or form. I pray that God will richly bless all of you. God’s peace and love.

Prologue

Prologue: In the Beginning

It was 1968. My mother was forty-two years old and my father was fifty-one. I had three older brothers age twenty, nineteen, and fifteen. The oldest brother was a truck driver and was married. His wife was expecting in November of that year.

My mother wasn’t feeling very well after April 20, 1967. This was my father’s birthday. She went to the doctor. He diagnosed her with a tumor. Then one day, the tumor had grown immensely. She went back to the doctor. The doctor looked her over again, realizing he had misdiagnosed her condition greatly. He had to break the news that it was not a tumor as thought of previously. It was a baby!

You’re pregnant, he said.

Oh, boy! Now what do we do? Should we give the baby up for adoption? We are so old and won’t even make it to see the child graduate, said my concerned father.

My grandfather convinced my father to just have the child and raise it, and so they did. January 21, 1968 arrived and so did the baby. It was a girl. They had wished for a girl since they already had three boys. My mother wanted a girl because her mother and sister had long hair, and they always took turns combing each other’s hair. She longed to be able to brush and comb her little girl’s hair.

The grandparents on my father’s side only had grandsons, so a granddaughter was a welcomed sight. The grandparents on my mother’s side were equally excited even though they had a large number of grandchildren. This was going to be the youngest grandchild. Being the only girl and the youngest in the family, no matter where this little girl was, she was smothered with unconditional love, born into this perfect little world. Well, that little girl was me. I became an aunt at nine months old, and this is my story.

Chapter 1

A Piece of Heaven on Earth

I was definitely a free-spirited barefoot little country girl, which you could say was a tomboy. I grew up in the country outside a little town in the Midwest. There were rolling hills with plenty of land to run free. A little creek that ran through the land divided the yard in the back from the fields. There was a bridge that you could cross over to get to the fields, and behind that were woods, a pond, and railroad tracks. This was the land that had been in the family since the 1800s.

My grandfather had a barn on his property. It caught on fire and burned down, so he rebuilt the big barn first and then built their home and all of their other barns on this land. It also included a shed, which was my grandfather’s workshop, a chicken coop, and I can’t forget the outhouse. It was a real live Farmville, like on Facebook on the computer now days.

My grandfather fell off the roof of his barn while building it and broke his neck. They told him he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life. However, he proved everyone wrong and walked again. The house was a two-story farmhouse with a cement basement. There was a huge wraparound front porch. The backdoor was the mudroom that went into the kitchen. They had an old-fashioned black water pump by the sink. You had to pump the handle by hand to bring the water up. They had a swinging door that led to the dining room. They would prop it open with an old-fashioned iron as a doorstop. It was made of real iron and was very heavy.

The bathroom was off the kitchen. You would walk down a hall past the dining room to enter the living room. There was a beautiful wooden staircase that led upstairs with a diamond window at the top to look out. There was also a back staircase that went to the bathroom from upstairs and both staircases met together to also lead to the basement stairs. My grandparent’s bedroom was off the living room. They had lots of bedrooms upstairs.

My father bought some of my grandfather’s land and built his home next to my grandfather’s. There was even a sidewalk that went through our yard from our home to my grandmother and grandfather’s home. I traveled up and down that sidewalk with my bike and pink wicker baby buggy over and over again. I had memorized every crack in that sidewalk so vividly, and it is still there today with every crack still the same. My father eventually bought even more land behind our home and put in a pond. He planted pine trees all around it. At the far end of the pond, he planted some pine bushes and crabapple trees that bloomed into beautiful light and dark pink blossoms in the springtime. He also planted a weeping willow tree at that end of the pond.

In the pond were bullfrogs that lined the outside of the pond. As you would walk by, they would jump into the water. They hung around until my father bought fish at a hatchery to put in the pond. He had bought catfish, bluegills, bass, and minnows. He would feed the fish with bread and fish pellets that looked like dog food. They were his babies. The catfish grew extremely large. He would also put copper sulfate in the water, and it turned the water to a bluish-greenish color. It looked so pretty up against the green grass. He had white stones around the edges of the pond.

The front of the pond was a sandy walk out beach that had boards under the water to let us know when we had reached the deep end. It would drop off from there. The deep end went down twenty feet. We had a raft, rowboat, and a dock as well. We had two really big weeping willow trees by the shallow end of the pond. A big white wooden shed stood in the middle of the two trees. The trees were great for shade. We would sit under them by the pond. They were also great for climbing. I built my own tree house. I used one board and two nails and climbed my way up the tree with the materials and a hammer and nailed the one board down between two branches. That was where I sat, on that one lonely board. It was the best tree house ever. I made it all by myself and I loved it.

One particular maple tree was my favorite to climb. We also had a big maple tree in the front yard in front of the house. My father had two big crabapple trees along the side of the house with some pine trees to block the wind and weather against the west of the house. Storms always came from that direction, going east from the west. The crabapple trees were pink and burgundy in the spring and were beautiful. My father had a true green thumb.

He planted all kinds of fruit trees as well. We had two pear trees and two apricot trees, but one died. He had two sweet cherry trees. One was yellow cherries and the other one was red cherries. He had a sour cherry tree, two peach trees, and an apple tree. The white blossoms in the spring were beautiful.

He didn’t stop with the trees either. There was a red rose bush and three lilac bushes dividing my father and grandfather’s land. Two were purple and one was white. The aroma was a wonderful fragrance as the breeze would carry the smell over the yard.

There were flowers of all kinds: yellow daffodils, pink and burgundy peonies along the white shed, tulips, lilies, and a beautiful yellow forsythia bush at the end of the driveway. My mother also planted petunias in all colors. They had a pussy willow bush as well. My mother would go across the road and gather bittersweet, which is orange-colored berries from the ditch, for fall decorations. It was by our mailbox.

My father also had his big garden. He would plant corn, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, potatoes, onions, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, strawberries, and raspberries. There was this really large mulberry tree at my grandfather’s that I would climb up in and eat until my heart’s content with juice stains everywhere. There were also rhubarb plants. I would pick it and chomp on it as if it were a stalk of celery. Bitter, oh so bitter. There was a walnut tree back by the creek, and I would go back and gather nuts from the ground and sit there breaking them open to dig out the walnut and eat them. I also found milkweed back there one time and broke it open and rubbed the milk on a wart I had on my knee and it went away and never came back.

I was assigned jobs around the house as well. There were always fruit trees that had to be picked, grass to mow, sheds to paint, and I even had to crawl under the house in the creepy, muddy, spider-infested crawlspace to put insulation up with a staple gun.

The dandelions got in on the action too. My mother had me pick them, and she would cook them. Dandelion greens. Of course, I had to take time out to say he loves me, he loves me not with the petals and mama had a baby and her head popped off while popping the head of the dandelion off its stem. I blew the seeds from the dead ones around, and I would smear the yellow of the dandelion onto my skin as if I were painting myself.

My father and brother helped me plant my first tree. It was the little pine tree you get from first grade that was a little stick. Everyone usually runs over it with the lawn mower and it dies, but not my father with the green thumb. I would go and water it. I was so proud of it. It grew very tall. I had my picture taken next to it as we both grew. By my graduation from high school, it was taller than me. It is still there today and towers way above me.

Needless to say, springtime was absolutely beautiful there. The white, pink, burgundy, yellow, purple, light green, green grass, blue water and sky just filled your sense of sight to the utmost. My father had made his own piece of heaven here on earth.

Chapter 2

Home, Church, Sundays, and Neighbors: Those were the Days

Like I mentioned before, my father built our home. It was a ranch-style home, which is one story with just a crawl space for a basement. It was a three-bedroom home with one bath until he extended it and made a fourth bedroom and a half bath with it. There was an attached garage with the laundry room attached to the back of the garage. They called it the utility room. The furnace and electrical box were in there too. The garage then led out to the side patio. I remember the garage door was a very heavy wooden door and had to be lifted by hand until I bought an electrical garage door opener for my dad years later.

The living room and dining room were at the front of the house, and it was all one big room. The walls were made of plaster with an arch leading to the hall that led to the bedrooms and the bathroom in the back of the house. My parents’ bedroom was in the front of the house. It was painted in the mint green color for a long time and then they changed it to more of a dark cream color.

The kitchen was located in the back of the house and was done in the very nostalgic ’50s theme. Yellow-and-black counters and tiles on the walls matched the yellow with black flowers of the metal kitchen table and chairs. He custom-built all of the cupboards in a gingerbread house look. The bathroom was done in pink and black tiles on the walls. He built a corner rounded self that was built into the sink.

The patio eventually was all enclosed with windows and sliding glass doors. He put in a solar-powered heating system on our roof. He also poured cement in the backyard and made a basketball court. He also turned the stone driveway into a cement driveway. He even added a gas tank to be used to fill the vehicles when needed.

We went to a little white country church just down the road on the corner from us. It was a Methodist church. My great-grandfather helped build this church many years ago. It had a beautiful painting of Jesus walking up a hill carrying a sheep while other sheep surrounded him. I was baptized there. I grew up lighting the candles, getting to watch them pull the large rope that rang the church bell in the bell tower, and going to Sunday school.

When I was real young, they dressed me as an angel for a Christmas program. I was so shy and scared, I started to cry. I had to have my mother by my side at all times. If she wasn’t next to me in Sunday school, I would run upstairs to try and find her. My Sunday school teacher was a teacher in another school district. I unfortunately didn’t have her as my schoolteacher, but I did for my Sunday school and was richly blessed by this. She showed me so much love, and we have a special bond to this day.

The members of the church also showed me so much love. I remember the old-time religious hymns that we would sing and how the windows would be opened in the summer with the cross breeze blowing over us and looking out at the sun shining down on the fields beside us. I had felt so much joy and had never felt so close to the Lord and had felt so much love, peace, and security. I remember singing all the songs in Sunday school as well and going to Bible school.

My mother would fix a pot roast with potatoes and carrots and put it in the oven. When we got home from church, it was ready to eat and it made the whole house smell so good. My father would read the Sunday newspaper and give me the funnies. I would sneak up on him and bang on his newspaper while he was reading it. He would lower