Nellie Moved To Town

"That was my first love, her name was Nell Cook. I seriously thought I was in love. It didn't work out that way. I went to the army in the early part of 1946; she wanted to get married right then. Well, I had this little bet with Daddy, we talked about some of the other kids, two sisters that got married when they were thirteen, one got married when she was fourteen, another one fifteen, to get away from home. My dad was pretty strict. Ira married when he was seventeen, was a father before he was eighteen. My father said kids today, too young to marry. You've got sense enough not to mary until you're twenty-two. And I said, Well, I'll be older than you before I get married. I did get married the year I was twenty-two. But getting back, she wanted to get married the year I and I knew too many war wives that anybody could have fun with, and I didn't want to leave one of them home. What she did as a single girl was her business. She corresponded with me the whole time I was in. Sweetest letters you ever seen. When I came back, before I even went to see my Mom and Dad, I went to Chattanooga, to that address where she'd been writing me from. It was a shotgun type house with a thingright down the middle, which meant one family lived on one side, one on the other. So here I saw a baby's play pen on the front porch and a baby's in there. I didn't know whose baby it was, so I stepped up to the door and knocked on the door with my cigarette lighter, a big zippo, and here she come to the door. Just before taking hold of her, just about to hug her neck completely off, I heard jolly green giant steps. Somebody you could tell was big. This guy walks up about this much taller than she was, and she said, 'Oh, I want you to meet my husband.' I could have fell through a crack in the floor. She'd been married for over a year. All the time she wrote those letters, she was married. But I'm kind of glad. She's gone through eight husbands by now." -- Charlie Louvin