Well, I was never one to refuse an invitation, so the very next morning about 6 o'clock a.m., I got up, dressed, woke up Carol who was about 3 and a half years old and Jack who was just a year and a half. I helped them get dressed and we toddled off down the alley to have breakfast with Aunt Janie and Aunt Sadie, leaving our sleeping parents behind. Our old Aunties were up at dawn and delighted to see us. We were sitting at their big round kitchen table with dish towels tied around our necks for bibs, happily eating soft-boiled eggs out of those little egg cups when I looked up and there in the doorway loomed my father with an very unhappy scowl directed at me. "What in the world do you think you are doing leaving the house at that time of morning without so much as a word to your mother or me?"

"Oh Aunt Janie invited us to breakfast, we didn't want to waken you." I answered "Didn't you think that we might be worried waking up and finding all our children gone," he said bending down scowling deeper right at me. He marched us all down the alley toward home. He didn't even let us finish our eggs in the little egg cups.

That was not the end of my wanderlust. I often went down the alley that summer. I loved to talk to the neighbors, and there was a little store down at the end where I loved to go in and talk to the customers. I was a great talker, and one of our neighbors asked me one time, "Rhoda does your mother wind you up in the mornings and you just talk until you run down?" For once, I didn't know what to say.

One day when my father came home for lunch, he found my mother in tears. "Rhoda is gone again," she said. He started out walking down the alley to find me. I was busily talking to some neighbors a few houses down. He didn't say a word to me. He nodded to the neighbors, put me up on his shoulders and started walking toward home. About half way there was a house with a chicken yard that bordered the alley. Those chickens were huge! He stopped beside the fence and held me over so that I could see them. He said, "Rhoda if you ever run away again and make your mother cry, I guess we will have to put you in that chicken yard." I was terrified. I never ran away again and to this day I am deathly afraid of chickens.

When fall came I went to Kindergarten. It was not memorable because that was the year we all three had Whooping Cough, Measles. Mumps and Chicken Pox. I missed a lot of kindergarten and I remember almost nothing about it. I do remember that at the holiday season that year we knocked the Christmas tree down three times and my mother cried because the antique ornaments from her childhood got broken. I guess my mother cried a lot in that year!! Bless her heart!!!