It would still be dark when we would start to hear them. The birds signaling the end of another long night.Daylight a pale blue glow on the horizon. That was our cue. It was bedtime.
Two transplanted yankees in the rural south of nineteen sixtey-six.Outcasts. Strangers. Outsiders. The tiny little town of Monterey, Tennessee was a very closed comunity in those days. Everybody knew everybody, and half of them we're related to the other half. My sister, and I stuck out like strobe lights in a coal mine. We we're not voted most popular at Monterey high.
It was too much for us a lot of the time. We stayed home as much as the truant officer would allow. Our Mom, bless her soul, wasn't strong enough to make us go. I went from being an honor roll student in Wisconsin to being in the special ed. class in one year.
It wasn't that I could'nt do the work. I just became so withdrawn from the blatent hostility of my classmates, that I just quit participating. So I wasn't really there even when I was.
We would sit in my sister's room all night, talking, daydreaming of "home", and listening to WLS in Chicago on the radio. We would tell mom we couldn't sleep, and were exhausted. After this worked a few times it became the routine, and we would miss two, sometimes three days a week. Safe in our isolation.
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