Mary Ellen (Minnehan) Bailey was born on Christmas Eve in a timeworn tenant farmhouse that was once a one-room school on the Nebraska prairie. The youngest of six surviving children her family moved from farm to farm where her father plowed with work horses before reluctantly switching to a tractor. She movingly recalls living with a mentally-challenged brother, riding horses and milking cows. She became a teacher, married a wildlife biologist, lived in Africa and Alaska, and raised three children who like her also became teachers. She died of colon cancer before her book was published.