So I admit it: not only am I an anachronism, I'm a writer and a poet. (c) Nita Walker Boles

My life began on a little farm in the Ozarks of Missouri. I was the third child born on that farm in Exeter, the second to live, and the first to thrive from the beginning. My oldest siblings could still cry at the thought of Betty Ann's death forty years later. My mother would later tell me of the near death of my sister, Mary Beth, who was not able to tolerate any form of cow's milk or formula. So dire was the situation, she said, that her sister sent a dress to bury her in. But she lived, and thrived when someone thought to try goat's milk. The pictures of me show a very plump baby...Mother must have been giddy to have a baby do so well.

The baby before Betty Ann was named Alma Jean, and she never came home from the hospital in Roswell, New Mexico. That is where my parents met, both single, each with two children of their own, and both working at the Air Force Base as civilians during WWII. After the war they bought a beautiful little farm near Exeter, Missouri. They had several years there to meld their families together, and to farm the beautiful land where my eldest sister says our father had to paint the fence posts to keep them from sprouting. But a drought set in and ravaged the area so long that we could not secure a living.

In a twist of hard fate, the drought drove us from the Edenic pastures of Missouri to Colorado. The older children scattered and the family was reborn in Denver with three young children. One older brother came home to finish high school but the rest progressed to adulthood living with relatives in Texas and New Mexico. In Colorado most of my memory of life as a thinking person begins. We did not know how poor we were, because life was too rich to imagine otherwise.