This is a continuing story.  It is the story of my life.  I call it "Windsong" in a board sense, although in a strict sense Windsong only covers 1952-1970.  This section of my book has not been formally organized or titled.  I post it here for your enjoyment (stories about real American life) and your corrections (helps me eliminate errors).

I have deleted a few personal parts, emotional stories of divorces and marriage, not suitable for this early of a release on the internet.  I'll wait a couple hundred years to release part of Windsong when people can't sue me!

Sheila and work

            Sheila and I had hung out in the motel long enough.  We’re ready to settle in to our new house.  We had both lived in houses before.  She’s parents had bought the house at 610 East Sixth Street in Mountain Home, Arkansas, the house which remains in the family as I write this in 2012.  I know they own it because Sheila inherited after her parents died and I’m sitting in it now as I write this.  My parents had rented several houses when I was a child and bought as well as built a few.  The house at 7861 White Oak Street in Reseda, California is the main home I remember as home as a young child.  What we called The House in the Valley was what I considered my first permanent home.  My parents moved away from there soon after I started college.

            My first wife, Gail and I, had bought a trailer house in Kentucky as previously described.  But a house trailer never felt like a home to me.  The house Sheila and I bought at 211 Burma Road in Pineville, Louisiana was the first house, a real house, either of us had bought in our adult lives.  Sheila did and have long to move in.  Soon after the van was unloaded she accepted a job as a nurse working for Dr. Godley across the river in Alexandria, Louisiana.  Both of us would keep the same job here for a little over eight years.  This would become the primary job of both our careers.  I worked at this location almost four times longer than I had ever worked anywhere. 

            In the future, I would work almost 5 years in Georgia.  But our two jobs in Louisiana were the longest we worked in any one place for the same company during all of our lives.  As I write this in 2012 I have been a writer and editor for a little over two years now.  I have six years to go before I can say I held this job longer than the one I held in Louisiana.  It is highly unlikely I will keep my current job for another six years.  Three things might happen to prevent that from happening.  I could die.  I am 60 years old and that does happen to people.  I could fully retire on Social Security and that is fairly likely to happen within the next six years.  Hopefully, more likely than either of those, I will end up spending six months to a year or perhaps even more working in China probably teaching English.  But that’s the future.  Let’s get back to our story.

211 Burma Road

            The house we purchased had several features we liked.  I describe them here to contrast them with other places where we have lived and so that my great, great, great, great grandchildren can know what life was like around the turn of the 21st century.  After all, we lived at this location from 1995 to 2003.  As we will see later, the turn of the millennium was not all it’s cracked up to be.  But it’ll be a long time before someone else can say they lived in two different millennia such as the 2000s and the 3000’s.  My oldest grandson may be one of the last people alive who lived in the 1900s.  He was born on December 31, 1999.

            In one way I felt terrible about moving into this house.  If you’re reading this in May of 2012 you will be one of the first people who have ever heard me discuss this aspect of my feelings.  I felt sorry for my first wife, Gail, who had chosen to live without me.  That had been, to a great degree, her own choice.  She had put up with the hard times, the five brutal winters we had survived in Kentucky which I described earlier in this book.  She had lived with me in my early adult life as I struggled to find my place in the world.  Now, as a result of her choices, she had already lived out her short life and would never get to enjoy the lifestyle that I was about to enter into.  As mentioned earlier, we divorced in the mid 1980s as she died of cancer in 1994.  She had died less than year before I moved into what is known as the American dream with my wife since 1987, Sheila.

            In many ways the house on Burma Road was a dream house for Sheila and I.  We had both struggled in our early adult lives and gone through bitter divorces.  Now, we were living like Americans were “supposed to” live.  We had a house, a mortgage, two cars which we would soon replace with car loans, and good jobs.  Our children’s lives had been sorely disrupted in ways we wished we could have prevented, but for the next several years our lives would settle down into some sort of level of normalcy.  There would be minor disruptions at times, but in general the next few years would be relatively smooth sailing.