I had never been more homesick or stressed than that Christmas in 1981, the year my husband, Charles, and I pulled up stakes and moved to the Texas badlands to work in the vast oil fields of the pan-handle. We were thousands of miles away from home for the first time. Our relationship was young, so we didn’t have the comfort of long years of habit to smooth over the lumps in life. Money was tight. If I hadn’t been madly in love with the man with the turquoise-blue eyes, I would have run home to Mama. As it was, I cried every time I heard “White Christmas.”
To me, Texas just didn’t look right—19 shades of brown, flat and with nary a tree in sight. Charles and I were both mountain-born and raised back east, in Tennessee and upstate New York, respectively. Out in the badlands—with no green hills to hold me in their hollows—I felt
