Ghosts of Christmas Past

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My world in 1958 teetered on the boundary between a small Midwest industrial town and the fields and pastures of the farm. I was the fifth member of our family to come along. My two older brothers and I and our parents lived in a ranch house our dad had built in 1951. The folks had gone to high school in the town and had been married there, at the Baptist parsonage on South Main, in ’43. Our parents had lived there all or nearly all the thirty or so years of their lives, except when they had gone to California during the war. When my dad shipped out to Europe early in ’44, my mother returned to the town to wait for him. He came back in December ’45. They settled into a rented house with their son, who was 16 months old when my dad returned from the war to his home town. The farm was the home of my paternal grandparents. In the middle of Henry County, Indiana, it was a modest farm of 81 acres with a 1920s farmhouse, a barn, a corncrib, and chicken houses. The house where we lived had been built on a lot that had been part of the farm when my grandparents purchased it in 1950. Our house was on the boundary between the industrial town and the farm.