My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers

Except when it came to picking motels; after that one fiasco our parents held veto power in that department. But this time the subject was more serious.
    “It will mean a lot more money than working for the county, and it would be an adventure,” Daddy told us. “But we’d have to leave Quitman and move to Saudi Arabia.”
    At first we were excited. Daddy was asked to be the king’s county agent! We’d go to a new school. Saudi Arabia had camels! And sand dunes! We all wanted to go.
    Then we went to bed. I spent the night tossing and turning, and so did everybody else. The next morning we filed into the kitchen one by one and changed our votes. By the end of breakfast it was unanimous. We would stay in Texas.
    Most days, Daddy worked behind his desk in his office in the courthouse basement. The city library was in a large room just down the hall, and when I was finished visiting him, I could while away the hours looking at picture books. When I got a little older, I devoured all the biographies, particularly of strong women: Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc. I may have picked up my reading habits from my dad, a history buff who loved books. In fact, he was the one who saved the Quitman library.
    One day when he was leaving work for his lunch break he saw the courthouse janitors throwing books into the hallway. The county apparently needed the space and was evicting the city library. The books were going to be tossed on the burn pile because there was no place to store them. My dad couldn’t stand to see perfectly good books wasted like that, so he got together with some friends in town and rented a house up on Billy Goat Hill to start a new library. Eventually the city moved the library into the old bank building, where it still is today.
    Daddy loved everything about history, and he was responsible for having historical markers placed all over East Texas. He also helped save the Stinson House, family home of the great Texas philanthropist Ima Hogg and one of the most important buildings in Wood County. It was built in 1859 out of virgin pine and oak, with clapboard siding, wide porches, and bay windows, but by the 1960s, it had been abandoned and was targeted by vandals. My dad arranged to have it moved to the state park in Quitman, where it could be protected. The house was cut into three sections and jacked up onto huge dollies, while crews took down power lines along the route. Onlookers lined up for miles to watch as heavy trucks slowly pulled each piece along the two-lane highway into town. It was the biggest parade the county had ever seen, and even more entertaining than when the circus elephants walked through town. My dad spent years restoring that house, piece by piece, and it became a museum and a place for the community to hold functions. Although he never asked for any recognition, the Stinson House stands as a monument to his love for the community and its history.
    In second grade my whole class got to visit the local salt mine in Grand Saline. It was an annual class trip for second graders. Everybody lined up to take the rickety old elevator down hundreds of feet into the earth. We clutched our paper lunch bags while the elevator bounced back and forth from side to side as it scraped its way down the shaft. Occasionally the lights would flicker as we descended, and we’d be in total darkness for a few moments. Some kids got scared and cried, but I loved the thrill. Down below was a huge translucent white cave of solid salt, like Carlsbad Caverns, but without stalagmites and stalactites. And it was slippery and cold. My little cotton sweater was not warm enough. There were big pieces of machinery scooping up buckets of salt while we were sliding and falling all over the place. They finally got us settled down and gave us a lecture about mining while we ate our sandwiches. Then we filled our empty bags with chunks of rock salt for souvenirs before the return trip to the