First surprise; mother had left my hair in curlers for the trip, and the morning of the 5th of December, anticipating arrival at our new house, I took them out.  My hair was perfectly straight, ugly and completely unmanageable!  It took three or four more tries with perms before I accepted that for some reason my hair absolutely will not take a permanent or keep a curl.  

Second surprise!  I didn't know my father knew how to cook or do laundry. He muddled through, and I helped but not very efficiently.

Every day I came home from school to an empty house, a first for me, to sit by the heat register trying to get warm while listening to the radio and reading the newspaper.  I will never forget reading about the escalating Korean war, although I usually just scanned the battle maps and headlines and went straight on to the funnies and crossword puzzle.   Up until that time, war was something that, while having a large effect on one's daily life, didn't have great personal consequences for me because everyone in our large extended family either wasn't the right age to be drafted, was already in a needed position stateside, or had been a civilian employee during World War II.  The maps of troop movements in Korea were abstract exercises, like playing with toy soldiers.

Our new home faced a city block of low, grassy vacant land, a catch-pond for floods and part of Lincoln's street drainage system.  A couple days after we arrived, a city parks employee turned on a fire hydrant full blast until the basin filled with water; freezing into more than an acre-sized ice skating rink. 

Each afternoon and evening I would watch from the window as people of all ages skated, flirted and gathered around a large bonfire surrounded by old chairs, logs and orange crates.  Young children skated early, teenagers and adults at night.   I had ice skated a little in New York, always with someone's worn-out cast-offs, and had outgrown the last pair.  For Christmas my dad put a box under the Christmas tree, but suggested I open it several days early.  There was a beautiful pair of bright red figure skates, exactly my size!

You can imagine where I spent the next few months, after school and on weekends.  Winter nights fell early, and when Daddy picked up my brother at the baby-sitter, he called me in to help with chores, as did my mother after she arrived with my new baby sister.  I was rarely ready to come in despite numb toes and nose.  My parents finally decided that I could stay out on the ice until 10 PM or so on Friday or Saturday nights.  

"Cruising Down the River" and "Ghost Riders in the Sky" were two of the most popular songs, and frequently on weekends someone from the Parks Department brought in a sound system to play those and other latest hits.  In between, much of the more serious talk around the bonfire was about the war.
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