Mom had quite a time - moving to small town Iowa...again, incomplete - but still fun!

Dear Diane,

I want to tell you a little about my strange new life. Of course you are used to it by now, but you must understand first the kind of life I came from before you can understand the life I entered. I was from a well-to-do middle class family in the East, attended private schools, Unitarian church, two different colleges (never did get through either one) and did most of the middle class things! Suburbia, to be exact! A very comfortable existence, with few pressures. I entered a life wholly unknown to me; little money, poor people (I didn't know they really existed, little education (only 2 college grads in our Gravity Church) and above all, I came to a part of the country where values hadn't changed in 50 years. Smoking and drinking...

I had never been west of Buffalo, NY. When I married your daddy, we drove north to Canada for our honeymoon - Lake Baskatong - no reservations. We just drove as far as we could and we found the most beautiful spot in the world. We were to spend part of the time with Frank's parents - so we stayed only two weeks in Canada and then started towards Iowa. I was amazed at the change in the land. It became flatter; barns and farmhouses dotted the country, and we passed through few towns. We reached Ottumwa, where your grandparents lived, at 12:30 am and I met my mother and father-in-law in their pajamas! Several days later, we all went down to Missouri to meet your daddy's grandparents. We stayed with a sister of your grandmother's - and the four of us slept in a large room in the attic - and us on our honeymoon!

I was anxious to reach Gravity and see the house and church that I could hardly wait to leave. Finally we were on our way. Our little VW was filled to the top, literally with stuff. In fact, I had to lean my head against a hat box in order to keep everyting from toppling over on me.

You can imagine the fear and excitement I felt as we neared Gravity. But the feeling of complete and utter disappointment that hit me as we entered the town was nearly enough to knock me down. The town is dirty, crumbling, dying and as your Aunt Mary mentioned not long after, it reminded her of a TV ghost town. She rather expected to see gunslingers come out at either end of the street and start shooting. The parsonage was a box-like affair with a front and back porch. The church and parsonage both needed paint and the parsonage sagged in teh middle like an old mattress. But the inside was far beyond my expectations - new paper - nice kitchen (except the oven always exploded when you lit it) and new linoleum. Everyone had worked so hard before we came.

Another page - new thoughts - she started over (some of this is a repeat as she was working out her thoughts.)

My husband is a Methodist minister in a small town in Iowa. It is much like any town of comparable size in Iowa, but to me it is absolutely unique, an entirely different world from that which I had known. I came originally from a suburb of Boston, of some 40,000 people. I was used to going into Boston for shopping, to theaters, to fabulous restaurants, whenever I felt like it. I was steeped in the New England middle class snobbishness and, of course, enjoyed every minute of it. And my name was on the Deb List since I had attended private schools and done all the right things in order to put it there.

My life changed entirely when I married my minister husband. He was from Iowa and wished to return there to take a pastorate. I can only describe my first sigh to Gravity as stunning. I was, literally, stunned! I knew it had only 275 inhabitants. I had looked it up in the Atlas. But I expected a pretty tree-lined main street, little white houses, a few nice clean-looking little stores, and above all, a gleaming white church and parsonage. There were a few trees, but the main street was graveled rather than paved, some of the houses were white, but most of them were unpainted, dilapitated shacks. The stores were there, 2 grocery stores, one Feed and Grain, one Produce (it took me a long time to figure out what that was), a Swap shop, 2 taverns and a bank. There were some empty stores that were collapsing, a gutted movie theatre, two other empty taverns, and a ramshackle barber shop that bespoke a long ago propserity. But my biggest disappointment was the parsonage and church. They hadn't been painted in 11 years! The parsonage was a 2 story box like affair with a front and back porch and it sagged in the middle like an old mattress. I felt exactly like a punctured balloon!