Humorous family events fill many of the pages of this book as Eleanor shares her life growing up on a farm in Wisconsin. She credits her parents for the joy and laughter in her home despite their frugal lifestyle and the hard work they did day after day. She recalls, for example, waking up one night to what sounded like an extremely loud crack of thunder, but then only hearing the normal sounds of frogs and crickets. Alarmed at first, she then hears, coming from her parents' bedroom, sounds of laughter. Mattresses at that time lay on springs held in place by slats. The slat under their heads had slowly slid to the side until the top one, which held up the spring under their heads, fell with a loud crash to the wood floor. As a result, the front of their mattress flew down and the back flew up. This, of course, left her parents in a peculiar position. Waking from a sound sleep, they were, of course, at first bewildered until they realized why their feet were in the air and their heads on the floor. Since they always seemed to find humor in most things, this struck them funny and both began to laugh. Mom said that getting up in those circumstances would have been difficult in any case, but laughing until they were weak didn't help. Eleanor also relates how her teatotaling Mother, and all accompanying her, reacted when she and her good friend were so busy chatting, they accidentally, while heading to the grocery store, turned in one entrance and one door too soon, looked up and saw they were in a local bar.
Every life, of course, has some trauma as well and at age ten, at the beginning of a guitar concert, just at the height of drama as the curtain rolls up with dramatic strumming of about seventy five to a hundred guitars, the guitar on her lap begins to levitate. It actually lifts her from her front row seat!
Oh, yes. And there's the story of an unexpected birth in the barn with only her there, a nine year old who doesn't know what is happening. Later her Dad tells her she saved the baby's life.
She also shares both the joy of her life as a preschooler with her grandfather and the trauma of his death. She includes lessons learned from various circumstances in her life noting that life and death are both experienced by all people, but we who believe will again enjoy our loved ones.
