By NORMA HANNAFORD

Contributing writer

Well! If this isn’t a kettle of fish! All at once, I have moved! Sometime, maybe, but I hadn’t planned this so soon. They say, “Seize the moment,” so I do.

I feel like I’m in a completely different town. I’m in St. Luke Living Center. I do know a lot of the employees and many residents; so that helps.

It is a very pleasant place and really comfortable; not really home but next to it. It will be interesting. I have already been checked in every possible way. I have already had therapy and questions. I feel like I want to get up and help rather than being helped so much. I hope I can get acquainted with some of the residents and hear their stories. I’m sure everyone has a story.

It is a strange feeling to leave the home I have lived in for 82 years. We were having our first child and I went to the old Marion Hospital, above the stores in the 500 block of West Main Street on the north side of the street. We went there on a Saturday afternoon. I was pretty scared — you know — having a first child.

Life was going to be different. In those days, you stayed in the hospital it seemed like 10 days. Then we took off for our first real home. My mother and my husband finished it and furnished it with a small amount of furniture.

A new home and a baby girl. Wow! Thank goodness my mother lived across the street.

Thus, I faced my future — not alone but with a husband and child, a strange house, and neither of us knowing beans about a baby. A baby was really enough!

Hello there world; here we come! Mr. Williamson, the furniture man, helped my mother and my husband choose more furniture. The storeowner gave us a baby cradle as a gift. Now I was ready to keep house.