When my husband left for Iraq, we lived in northern Wyoming, a house half a mile from any other children. He was gone 15 months with the Army National Guard. My husband had missed two opportunities to deploy previously; it was 2004 and units were deploying from all over the U.S. This time we were ready… well, as ready as could be. We had just moved there, a 30 minute drive from my parents; the house was a large one with an orchard, irrigation ditch, pine trees, a swing. The garage was even large enough to hold our 15-passenger van inside without any scrapes.

We had moved from a neighborhood with 20 or more children nearby, to a less populous neighborhood in Laramie, Wyoming for six months, then to this house in the backside of beyond: Emblem. The population sign said “10”. It lied. We more than doubled the population with our five children. The nearest actual town was six miles away: Burlington. It had 250 people listed inside the town, but hosted two and a half congregations of Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Each congregation, called a ward, had 150 or more people regularly attending, and the half, called a branch, had 90+ every Sunday. The town was surrounded by farms and ranches. The average family size was six children and we knew a family with 14; the mom babysat her grandson along with her own two-year-old the same age.

Okay, so the average was probably closer to four or five children; I didn’t actually work it out. But I served as a Cub Scout leader; the other leaders each had six or seven children except one. The one mourned over having only two children due to health issues.

I loved the atmosphere in Burlington. No one so much as blinked over our having five children. I was a month pregnant with number six when my husband left for Iraq. During those 15 months my husband was home for two weeks in the middle: a week before the baby was born, and a week after. The people in our ward, and our relatives, many of them the same people, carried us through that time. The bishop of our ward took my children trick-or-treating and on outings with his children. His wife and several other people took our children to activities and back home again. One of the young men, about 16-17 years old, adopted our family for Christmas; he approached businesses in the next bigger town to donate presents for us. He was very sneaky. We never caught him dropping off stuff in the dark. We did, however, suspect, after his father showed up unexpectedly to visit in the evening. Afterwards his father told me the young man had dropped his car keys in the dark. His father came to check our porch, and as a cover, visited to see how we were doing.

Several people came to help us move our stuff into the house. They came again to clean when we were preparing to move out, and they loaded the moving truck. Two or three of the men in the ward were assigned to check on us regularly; they did, faithfully. When our furnace stopped working one of them came to help my dad fix it. When I bought a new set of bunk beds one of them drove half an hour to the store to pick it up, disassembled it there, brought it into our home, and assembled it. My sons helped with assembly, and climbed all over it when he finished.

After that experience I understood better why my parents chose to settle permanently in a small Wyoming town. They had grown up in a tightly knit community, with less worldly influence. My mother wanted that for her children. They ended up moving several times in Utah and then Wyoming, focused on small towns. Ultimately they didn’t stay in Burlington, where they had both grown up, probably because they had already tried making a go of it in Burlington before I was born. My father tried farming: growing crops, and ranching: growing cows. Neither turned out well for him. He earned a bachelor’s degree, paid for by the GI Bill, then got a job teaching business at Greybull High School. That lasted only a couple years before his contract was not renewed. By that time he had bought a house. Rather than move again he found a job at a lumberyard and later as the church custodian. By the time I grew up, they knew most of the people in Greybull; most people knew them and liked or respected them. They helped each other.