My son had his first birthday a few months after my family moved to Middle Tennessee. His sister was 3. We moved to a community where we didn’t know anyone. We started attending the Methodist church in town and soon made friends there. One of the ladies that the got to know from the first was Joanne. She worked in the nursery and fell in love with our kids. She was big intimidating woman with a sweet spirit and a heart of gold. My first impression of here was that she didn’t look like the kind of person that you would want to entrust to take care of your children. But there were other people in the nursery that looked like they were more responsible that would keep any eye on her. She didn’t keep herself that well, appeared to be relatively poor and was probably not very well educated. But she was dedicated to taking good care of our kids and she did a good job.
During our 3 years there, we would add another daughter to our family. I remember having reservations about leaving our newborn with Joanne, but she was in good hands. When we decided to return to West Tennessee, Joanne gave us a gift to remember her by. It was a photo of her in a little charm that was intended to go on a necklace or bracelet. We put the charm in our printer’s drawer where it is today.