Imagine:  You are a young child of ten years. You’ve always lived in the rural country side. Your father is a farmer. Your mother stays at home. She keeps the house clean, cooks three meals each day for five persons, including two men who work on the farm. Your house sits alone beside the road. You see friends at the little church and neighbors from up the road sometimes stop by. Other days you see no one but your family. This is all you’ve ever known.

One day, your mother packs your clothes and says you must go to live a city of 500,000 people. Yes, you know the people you’ll live with a little bit, but you’ve never been to the city. You’ve never lived in a house on a street with houses close to yours. There are always people walking by your house – people you don’t know. Is it difficult to get accustomed to a very different life?

I am writing a children’s novel with the opposite situation.  My ten-year-old girl has been sent to a dairy farm to live with her cousins and their parents, her aunt and uncle. The time is the summer of 1943. She is there because her father is in the U. S. Navy. Her mother, like many other moms during World War II is working in a war factory.

She knows nothing of farm life, is afraid of the animals, and thinks of the barn as an awful stinky place. She is worried about the safety of her father.  How does she feel about being on the farm? Will she adjust? How will she lose her fears?

Do you think you would be able to change and love the farm?