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Life on Pleasant Street was so serene. The younger children played in the woods and creek in the summer and rode down hill in the winter. The older kids would join the younger ones in the evenings in summer and play hide and seek after dark. The women would have coffee together some days and the men talked on the porch in the evenings. The perfect family lives until everyone went into their houses at night.

I thought my life was different than anyone else's on the street. One of my very first memories is sitting in the dining room in the dark, watching (yes, watching) the radio. It was a large floor model and when on, had yellow lights. Kate Smith was singing at the time when I became aware of something going on with my parents in the kitchen. I looked through the doorway as my mother broke a canning jar over the edge of the kitchen table, sliced my father's lower, inner arm, and threw him down the cellar stairs and locked the door behind him.

My parents usually would fight after I was in bed when I was little, I guess thinking I slept through them. Instead I laid in bed with the cover up over my head with just my nose sticking out to breath. And when they fought, it was not just with words, it was with physical violence. They picked up furniture and threw at each other, used things to hit each other with, and got very, very loud. And, fought long into the night. And, if he didn't start the fight, she would.

In the morning, things would be as they had always been, quiet and serene, although it wasn't always the case. What they didn't realize, that with all that noise, everyone on the street heard. And every holiday was the perfect opportunity for a fight. One night they had started fighting early and somewhere along the line, I fell asleep. When I woke up, the next door neighbor was there, still trying to get them to stop. I got up and was getting ready for school when I heard them both say that the only reason they were staying together was for my sake.

It was like something exploded inside of me. I yelled and told them that I didn't want them to stay together for me and I didn't want to live with either one of them. My outburst was met with total silence. I finished getting dressed and walked out the door without seeing any of them. This continued off and on until I was married at 16 to get out of the house. After that, I would visit and see bruises on one or the other of them.

In my early teens, I discovered that similar things were happening up the street from

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