P. A. Nelson Knihy

The woman I approached looked very different than my twin sister did the last time I saw her. Could this be a ruse; somebody pretending to be my long-lost identical twin sister? But what would be the object of such an action? Our family didn't have any money and we certainly couldn't have come into the view of some gangster or national embezzler. We are an average farming family who had to give up farming and resort to becoming employees of small local businesses. Surely nobody would target us for a scam. If it really is Anastasia, why all the cloak and dagger moves? Surely, she wouldn't lie to me and make up some impossible story about her life and why she had been lost from us for so many years! When she removed her sun glasses, I knew it was Anastasia, my identical twin sister who had gone to a lot of trouble to hide her identity from her new world. My heart dropped to the ground as I sat down across from her. Where had she been all these years and what happened to make her deny her family and who could hate her enough to want to kill her? I had hundreds of questions I wanted to ask, but she had given me a script that I had to abide with, because we were both in danger for our lives just sitting here talking.

The Hills is a true story experienced and told to me over the years by my mother, Beth. This story about my mother's childhood began in Lepanto, Arkansas and ended in Concrete, Washington. There was a lot of pathos, happiness, and learning about life that we don't see in our families today. Mother's fi rst seven years were spent in a little 2 bedroom house in Arkansas where she learned family values. The second part of her journey in growing up was three weeks spent in a Model A crossing the United States in a move to improve the "quality" of their lives. Upon arrival in Concrete, Washington, her family settled into a situation where they had a much nicer lifestyle for a time. It is a true story of how families were making it in the "Big Depression".