The house sat there on the hill overlooking rich black bottom land. Actually, it stood on the edge of a ridge about three miles across that sloped south along the New Madrid fault line.
The family moved to the house on the hill from Arkansas. Although we were a pitful sight, I'm sure we were hardly noticed. Everyone rode around in a flat bed two ton truck with wooden, slightly bulging, side boards.
Mama and the babies rode in the cab, the rest of the family were tossed about in the bed of the truck along with the beds, cook and heating stoves, tubs, kettles, a few items of furniture, clothes tied up in bed sheets and of course, farming equipment.
Daddy turned off Highway 61 and we bumped along a for a couple miles on a dusty farm road before pulling into the front yard.
The family we were uprooting were still in the house. They had been dragging their feet about moving for weeks, maybe months. When they saw the eight or nine kids jumping out the bed of the truck and Mama exiting the cab with a baby on each hip they decided it was time to move on.
The house on the hill was ours. So this was home, a big two story house perched on cement blocks, wooden tree stumps and piles of rocks. As precarious as the house appeared then, it remains to this day to me a symbol of stability, protection, comfort, home.
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