Hindsight is 20/20 looking back!

 My momma, the wisest woman in the world told me that years ago. I sometimes wonder if my kids will ever look back and remember anything I said.  I sure hope they do.

Growing up in a house that was home to six kids we all had our place in the hierarchy.  When my father married my mother, he had 3 sons from his first wife who had died.  They had been placed in an orphanage because he could not care for them.  The younger two were adopted into homes but kept in touch over the years.  The oldest left the orphanage at age 18 and mostly wandered the world.  

Of my family growing up, Josephine was oldest because she was the first born to my mother.  She had a different father than my dad.  Her father was supposedly a gangster in Chicago.  Who knows!  Then came Jake, who was the only son, simply because he was the only son.  Then came me, a bright and shining star on the roster of children!  Not really.  That put me in the middle child position which is not a place anyone wants to be.  But there I was, nonetheless.  Then the others who mostly tended to favor my father in coloring and mannerisms.  Donna and Mary were next followed by Dorothy who was the youngest.  Her sole claim to fame is that she was the last one born to my mother. 

Mary was always my dad's favorite.  There was never a question about it: It just was.  When Mary went to Junior High School and they had a dance, my dad went to town and bought her a beautiful white prom dress.  It was so soft.  Mary met and married her future husband when she was 13 or 14 years old.  He was 15 or 16 at the time.  I think.  I am a little foggy on the ages, but they were both very young. I do know I borrowed her prom dress when I married Earl Duane Seeger in 1960.

I look back down the road that I have traveled, and it makes me very sad.  My mother tried to give us kids everything we wanted and needed when she herself had been through trauma that I would never know about.  There are only two of us left, me and Donna.  I wonder if Donna ever thinks about our childhood.  I wonder if she remembers it the same way that I do?  I do know she squeezed a baby rabbit so hard once that it bled out its mouth and she put it in a drawer and covered it up with a washcloth, but it died anyway!

For the record, Lavender is still my favorite color, and my mother is still the angel that I remember.  The only difference is that instead of living on Strong Street in Nickerson, or on Avenue A in Hutchinson, she is walking on the streets of gold.  She is not in any pain, and she gets to look down on me and see that she raised a very strong woman after it is all said and done.  She is waiting for me to take that leap from here to where she waits for me.  I just hope she knows how happy I am that I was raised at her knee.

We all different mannerisms as is common in big families.  Josephine was the oldest, so she was bossy.  Jake was the only boy, so he was expected to do boy things, like chop wood, take the old tomcat that ate the baby chicken to the forest and chop off its head with the same axe, and mostly just do boy things.  He did let me tag along sometimes.  Of course, we all had to cater to Mary and Dorothy, because Dorothy was the baby, and Mary was the pretty one.  Mary was also Dad's favorite.    I do not think he liked me at all, but that taught me how to raise my own kids later in life.  

I bent over backwards to make sure that I did not favor one over the other.  If I spent $20 on one for Christmas, I spent $20 on each of the others.  Later my son pointed out to me that this was wrong.  I should have bought each one a gift especially chosen for them regardless of price.  He also pointed out that he was the only boy and should therefore be granted special status!  Little turd!

But this blog is actually about my high school prom.  Mom had somehow managed to get her hands on enough shiny polyester fabric in a beautiful lavender color.  She then scraped together enough to buy several yards of lavender net to pair with it.  She sewed me a beautiful prom dress all my hand with a pattern in her head!  It was beautiful!

It is at this point that the adage, "You cannot make a silk purse out of a cow's ear." comes to mind.  The softest net is very soft and lays differently than the cheap net that momma could afford.  When the skirt was stitched together with the bodice, it left the stiff net to completely encompass my waist.  What started out to be a fairy tale night, ended up being a torture.  By the time I got home to take the dress off I had a very raw waistline that was actually bleeding. It was packed away in a box under the bed and I do not know what ever happened to it. 

Lavendar is still my favorite color.  Always will be.  Lavender is still my favorite scent, and the beautiful fields of Lavender in Grand Junction is my favorite place in the spring.   

Momma told me long ago that my childhood would be what defined me in my later years.  She sure hit that nail on the head!  My experiences of those long-ago years guide me in everything I do in my old age.  When I think of momma it is always the house on Strong Street and the old wood stove and the ducks and chickens out back.  It is the Peach Tree by the chicken house and the treadle sewing machine and the Catalpa tree by the road.

Wonder it that is what heaven is like?  I sure hope so!

Peace!

You cannot get the toothpaste back in the tube!

 There are 2 phrases that my psyche is shaped by and that I also fight with most of my adult life.  The first is "Hind sight is 20/20 looking back." and the second is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."  There are many little things momma threw in along this line and for the life of me I do not know where she got them.  I strongly suspect that she got them from her mother since they lived a fairly cloistered life there in south central Kansas.  The sad fact remains, that all these years later, those are burned into the depths of my being.

In my younger days I was surrounded by Aunts, cousins, grandmothers and a few uncles.  Males in my lineage tended to either die young or live forever.  Uncle Coon lived to be over 100.  (Now I am not sure that this was his given name.  Seems like it might have been Conrad, but it is irrelevant to this article!)  The point is that while the rule at the time was that children should be seen and not heard, the other was that men were the strong silent type and it was best to remember that.  As kids it was our past time at family gatherings to hide under the table and watch the men enjoying an after dinner cigar or pipe.  As I recall there was a lot of coughing and choking while this "pleasure" was being indulged.  

This pastime was second only to spying on the chickens in the coop and hoping one would poop out an egg and we could see where it came from. (To this day I do not actually know how the plumbing of a chicken works, nor do I care!)

I only recall one male cousin in my youth and that was cousin Carl. The girl cousins were named Rosetta, Alvina and Marilyn.  I had another cousin named Donna, but she lived in St. Louis and we rarely seen her.  She never married.  

Carl and I were close at the time.  We used to weed the garden for grandma after family dinners.  Carl grew up and married someone and they had one child.  I am not sure it grew to adulthood.  Seems momma was the only one out of the whole family that was a good "breeder."

Momma had eloped immediately after graduation.  She married a man named Jack Walden and ran away to Chicago.  They lived near the "Loop" whatever that was.  They had a baby girl and for some reason mother found herself hitchhiking back to Kansas with the baby in her arms and fearing for her life.  (Or so I hear. Little bit of "toothpaste" for you there.)  When the baby was but a year old she married what would be my father and they lived not so happily ever after.  While the marriage may have been a bit rocky it lasted until his death in 1965.  I ended up with 3 half brothers, 1 full brother and 3 sisters.  Guess Josephine was my half sister.

All that is irrelevant!  It was at my mothers knee that I learned the art of being seen and not heard.  I also learned that when the words "Little pitchers have big ears!" were used I was about to be banished to another room and I better not listen to what was being said.  "Ixnay" meant no.  Anyone who died went directly to heaven!  No doubt about it!  The meanest SOB that ever walked went to Heaven.  Man beats his horse; straight to Heaven!  Seems like the only thing that would actually keep you out of heaven was lying to your mother and disrespecting your elders.  Stealing and pulling the legs off grasshoppers were minor infractions.  

So, here I set lo! these many years later, still a child!  Could it be that as we age, we become our mothers?  I need to ask my kids how their minds work.  Did they actually learn anything from me and if so, what was it?  Did they walk away with my good qualities or the bad ones?  Do they look back on their childhood as a learning experience?  Was I a good mother?  I know I was rarely there, but do they know I tried?

I guess only time will tell.  I do know they are all independent, compassionate human beings and I love them and they appear to love me.  I hope that I imparted just a bit of my wisdom and honesty to them by my actions.  It may be something I never really know, but when I look at the lives they live, I am proud of each and every one of them.  And I am proud of their offspring.  

Kinda hope that the fruit does not fall too far from the tree in my family tree!

Peace and love!

Front sight is 2020!

It used to be that hind sight was 2020, but now when the clock strikes midnight we will be looking forward to 2020!  Well, some of us a little more than the rest of us.  I have made this leap 77 times and I find it is not luck, or whether I ate Black-eyed Peas or not, but more just a luck of the draw.  Before I found out I had to eat Black-eyed Peas in order to secure my good luck for the coming year, I had pretty good luck.  Then I started eating them and my luck stayed the same.  Could it be an old wives tale?

And speaking of old wives tales, the grandmothers were full of them.  I tend to think of them more as wise tales as opposed to the wives tales.  Here are a few for your consideration.

"Where spider web grows, no beau ever goes."
"Once bit, twice shy."
"Broken mirror brings 7 years of bad luck."
"Step on a crack; break your mothers back."
"Any thing that can go wrong, will go wrong."  (This is called Murphy's Law.)
"Spill salt you have to pick it up and throw it over your shoulder to ward off the bad luck"
"13 is an unlucky number."
"A black cat crossing your path is bad luck."
"Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning."
"Red sky at night, sailor's delight."

This list goes on and on, and I am pretty sure that I violated every one of them!  And yet here I am, alive and well and facing another year.  But, you know what?  Life is good.  Where there is life there is hope.  My momma told me that and I have lived by that my whole life.  My life has had it's ups and downs, but I would not change one single thing about it!

This is my take on life: Every man I married and every man I did not marry, was for a reason.  I learned something from everyone of them.  Some of the lessons were very hard and some still bring tears to my eyes and there are things I would know now that I should have known then that I can not change.  Every person I met along the way to today made an impact on who I am now.  Some of my lessons made me a better person; some of them taught me that life is reality.  But that is yesterday; and yesterday is gone.  I will not pass that way again.  There are no second chances at some things.

So Happy New Year!  We will toast a cup of kindness now to Auld Lang Syne; however you spell it and whatever it means!  Today is a new day and tomorrow will be a new year.  Every New Years Eve, I forgive myself, and every New Years Day, I try to do better.  Maybe someday I will get it right.

One more thing I know is that when I finally do get it right, the big guy upstairs is going to jerk the rug out from under me and holler "Hurry up and get in here while you are good to go!"

Peace to all and remember,

 "You can not sprinkle showers of happiness on other people without getting a few drops on yourself."

This about says it for me.

I have spent my whole life searching for something.  Always looking for the outfit that would make me beautiful, the meal that would satisfy me, the car I would love to drive, and clear down to searching for the man that would make me complete.  Some of those things I actually found, but no longer have them.  I do the looking back and regretting a lot, but it does not seem to do any good.  Then I found this picture on facebook and it pretty well sums it up.

I have the big house.  I have the car.  I have more clothes then I will ever wear, eat what I want when I want.  I had the man who made me feel complete for 20 years.  Now I am alone and I have the perfect opportunity to find myself.  It is time to deal with that little girl on Strong Street, the battered wife, the neglectful mother, the absent sister, and the wayward daughter.

Many years ago I put all my emotions in a closet and now I find that I would like to take them out, examine them, forgive myself and move on.  I suppose life itself is built on a learning curve and I am just grateful to have stayed on this spinning ball long enough to understand this.

I can not save the world.  I can not even save one person, but I can save myself.  Maybe some day there will be room in my life for another man, but it is not now.  I am going to look at myself in the mirror and not see wrinkles and scars.  I am going to see a kind, loving woman who wants to save the world, but I am going to start with myself.  This pretty much sums it up! (click blue)

Wish me luck!

Oh, the things in my mind.

Click here to listen  I woke up this morning with this song on my mind.  Then I went to facebook and some one had posted the same link.  Small world.  However the context the person had posted the link was far different than the link in my mind.

Like most, actually all, people, I had a father.  I knew him.  Or I thought I did.  A very wise woman once told me, "You never really know anyone, you only know of them.  You know what they let you see."  And so it was with my father.  He was a lot older than my mother, but the wedding picture shows a very happy woman.  My mother was very well liked in high school and married soon after she graduated.  Sadly that marriage did not end well and soon she returned to her roots and married my father.  He was a widower (? but some secrets are best left untold).  He had 3 sons that were past their teens.  They had been put into an orphanage when Dad's first wife died.  2 were adopted, one was not.

Jake was the first born to this union followed by me, Donna, Mary and Dorothy.  We were all as different as night and day.  Jake was the only son and he was a screw up according to my father.  Of course I was perfect, but he never did particularly like me much.  He was of the old school that kids were to be raised and leave home.  Now just look at me!  Wasn't I the cutest thing you ever seen?

Donna was smack in the middle so she had middle child syndrome.  Dorothy was the baby, so she carried those tendencies throughout her life.  Ah, but Mary.  Mary was cute and delicate and everyone loved Mary. Now you must understand that this is being written by me and is my feelings.  I am sure if the other sisters were alive they would dispute my findings, but you must realize that we are all a product of our raising and I never at any time ever in my life ever thought my father cared about me in any way shape or form.  It was as if I existed in a vacuum.  If he was there he ignored me.  He refused to attend my first marriage.  I simply did not exist.

Ah, but he had a weakness.  He liked babies. Shortly after the birth of my first daughter he paid my older sister to sew her a pretty red dress and he bought shoes and a hat to match.  Some where I have that picture of him holding Debra when she was about a year old and wearing that outfit.  That is the only one of my children he ever touched.  I don't recall him ever touching me in anger or love.  I never actually had a conversation with the man.  If I fell and skinned my knee that was my problem. 

And then he died.  By this time I had the 3 girls.  I left them with my sister in law and came home for the funeral.  I remember how very sad that was.  I stood at his open coffin and cried my heart out for a man I never knew.  I do not think a child ever understands their parents and I envy the children who played catch with their fathers.  Or took walks.  Or went fishing.  That is why I always tried to keep my kids and their father in close contact.  He and I had a strained relationship, but he and the kids found a way to make it sort of work.  We sort of shared custody, but that is water under the bridge.

I do remember far in the back of my mind, that dad was a share cropper with a man named John Britan.  John had acreage across the river and sometimes (and I will never know why) I would go with dad to the acreage and John Britan would make me hot chocolate using cocoa, sugar, hot water, and Pet milk.  It was the best stuff in the world!  I have tried to make it but it is never the same.  I also remember that there was a little creek that run through the farm and sometimes it had water in it.  Jake made me a little boat out of a flat piece of wood.  He put a stick through a hole and tied a string to it so it would not get away.

So, as sad as my childhood was, I do have some good memories.  I just forget them sometimes. 

There was a barn and horses.

I woke up this morning remembering the barn.  The horse tank was out the back door of the house and off to the right.  For years it had a "pitcher pump" and we all took turns pumping to keep water for the animals.  Ever now and then we had to fish a chicken out because chickens can not swim.  That was not very often, because chickens are fairly smart that way.  We had Muscovy ducks and they occasionally took a spin around the tank, but they were very leery of those big horse teeth and mostly stayed around the back of the house where the kitchen sink drained out on the ground.  That was back before there were laws about that.
There was a red milk cow.  Her name was "Bossy".  She shared the barn with the other animals.  She eventually gave birth to a black calf that I immediately named Dennis.  She then took sick with milk fever (?).   My dad and the neighbor man tried to save her.  They even cut her tail open and put salt and pepper in it and bound it up.  That was sure to cure her.  Unfortunately, it did not.  Dennis took sick soon after and I think that was because he had no mother to feed him.  He also died, which broke my heart.
There was a brown horse named "Danny" that was my sister Josephine's.  It was her's because that was the meanest damned horse in the world and she was the only one who could ride him.  The rest of us kids were relegated to a Shetland pony whose name was "Star".  Dad would put one of us up on his back and then lead him around the corral.  I never did like either Star or the rides so I mostly hid out when that was going on.  The little kids got a kick out of it though.
My Dad had a big scar on his upper arm (think that is called a bicep).  (For this reason I have always been afraid of horses thinking that one might bite me.)  It dated back to when he was in the Army (World War 1).  He was in the Cavalry.  His job was to tend the horses and one bit him.  I knew my father to be a very mean man sometimes.  He never mistreated us kids physically, but he did tend to mistreat animals.  One of the things used to control horses was a stick with a loop of rope on the end.  The rope was put around the upper lip of a horse and twisted.  The horse was then pretty much at the mercy of whoever held the stick.  I do not remember what that thing was called.  Of course there was a black snake whip that hung in the barn for when the horses were really out of control.
Dad had a fondness (more like an obsession) for show horses.  They were not just show horses, they were work horses that were beautiful.  My dad was one of the last people to give up the horse and plow.  He would never buy one horse.  He always bought a matched pair.  The last matched pair he had was the only pair I even remember.  They were Strawberry Roans.  They were big and a light pinkish color.  They had blonde tails and my father would stand for hours brushing them.  When he went into town their tails were braided and he was a sight to behold.  My father.  (pause while a flood of memories leaves me in tears.)
The upper part of the barn was called the "hay loft."  It was called that because that is where the hay was stored.  That was also where the old cats went to have their kittens.  When the cow was alive and we milked her, there was a bowl by her stall that was always filled with fresh milk at milking time.  The one legged stool hung on a peg above it. 
When the hayloft was filled with fresh hay, we had to check it periodically through the day.  If some of the hay that went in the loft was not quite dry enough, it would heat up and if not turned to get air to cool it, burst into flame.  First it started to smolder and usually we picked that up right away.  We took the pitch fork and pulled that part of the hay stack out and threw it out the opening onto the ground where we spread it to cool, or burn if it was that hot.  Lots of barns burned to the ground because of that little problem.
My dad was pretty much a share cropper and us kids were put into use real regular. Sometimes we went to wheat fields and pulled out the Rye that sprung up magically.  If the elevator man found Rye in the load of wheat being sold, he would "dock" dad on the pay.  Sometimes we harvested field corn.  We picked the dry ears and stripped them in the field and then tossed them on the corn wagon.  The corn wagon was just a horse drawn wagon with board added on the back side so the corn bounced off and landed back in the wagon with the rest of the corn.  We picked rocks out of fields.  We pulled weeds in the garden.  Especially fun was cleaning the manure out of the barn and hauling it to the pile in the corner of the corral.  We gathered eggs.  Brought in fire wood.  Carried out the trash.  Made the beds. Washed the dishes.  In the winter we tried to stay warm and in the summer we tried to stay cool.
One of my clearest memories is laying on my stomach by the chicken house with my brother and watching the "dead animal wagon" back up to the fence in front of the barn.  The man pulled the wench chain out and over to the barn where he wrapped it around Star's neck.  He hit the button and Star was unceremoniously drug up over the sill, across the pen, under the barbed wire fence and up into the back of the truck.  My last memory of Star was seeing the truck pull onto the road and drive off with Star's  legs sticking straight up into the air.  Jake and I were very quiet the rest of the day and night.  Then life resumed, just like there had never been a Shetland Pony named Star in our life.
And now I sit here with my memories.  I see the house just as clearly today as I did then, only now I appreciate it more for it's simplicity.  I see my brother in his overalls.  The scar on his face was put there by Star many years before. 
There are only 2 of us left now.   I feel closer to the past then I do the future.  I long for those days when I could feel the breeze on my arms and face.  Back then I could not wait to grow up and get away.  I wanted my own home.  My own family.  Well, I got it and here I set.  If there is one thing I would tell the people I know it is this:  Hold on to today, because today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.  Yesterday is gone and tomorrow never comes.  I think they wrote a song about that.

A sharecropper Christmas or Gibby is gone, but the memories are not.

There were eight of us living in a lathe and plaster house where the snow blew in sometimes because there were chinks in the plaster, but Christmas was always Christmas.  It was the one holiday a year that really mattered in that 2 bedroom house at 709 Strong Street in Nickerson, Kansas.  There were 3 things that would happen that day without fail.  Santa Clause would have stopped by in the middle of the night, Dad would stay sober and  there would be a meal on the table.  The wheels of progress had started probably the Christmas before when Mother started counting her pennies and making the list of what each one of us would receive. She always had a stub of a pencil and a list in her pocket. I never really got a good look at that list, but I am sure my name had appeared there some where.   All year she worked towards that one goal.  Mother's do that, or at least mine did.
School got out for vacation about a week before Christmas.  Every classroom had a Christmas tree. and every tree had tinsel.  The last day before vacation started was the day to "take down the tree."  The tree then went home with who ever did not have a tree up yet.  We counted on getting one.  There were 6 of us little urchins and the teachers would decide.  We always got one!  I remember the year I was the lucky recipient.  Can you imagine my pride at dragging that tree home the whole mile to our house.  I was so damn proud I thought I would pop!  And the teacher had left all the tinsel on it.  Of course by the time I got it home the tinsel had thinned quite a bit on the side that was dragging in the dirt.  I thought I would pop my buttons when momma propped that tree up and Christmas was on the countdown!
We did not have stockings, but rather we wrote our name on a piece of paper and placed it where we wanted Santa to put our gifts.  Funny, I don't really remember ever giving my mother a gift in all those growing up years.  I made her cards, but never a physical gift.  And then there was the time I babysat and earned some money and went to Doc Wards store and got her a stainless steel mixing bowl.  I did that because I had broken her glass one and felt really bad about that.  Well, when I grew up and moved away I would send her stuff, but that really doesn't count.
As the years went by and mother picked up more house cleaning jobs the piles grew bigger at Christmas.  The first one I remember was a coloring book, colors, a red rubber ball, and an orange.  The last Christmas I remember Santa Clause was when my brother woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me he had helped mom and dad put out the gifts and there was no Santa Clause.  That year I got one of those tin doll houses that clipped together.  You know, the miniature ones with mother, father, sister and brother and all the tiny furniture and you could buy more!  And always there was new underwear and socks!  Wise mother to make the piles bigger with stuff we had to have anyway!
And then it was my turn to be Santa.  In all fairness, I do not remember much about those years.  The kids dad and I divorced when the kids were small and he was good at bringing presents, but not much for the child support.  His reasoning was that I had the kids and all the pleasure they brought so why should he have to pay me?  He was the one with not kids to keep him company and in my warped mind I saw the reasoning that made him tick!
I was always a procrastinator and sometimes Christmas got there before I realized that as Santa I had work to do!  One year my friend Gibby was kind enough to help with the last minute shopping the day before Christmas Eve mind you!  We rushed from store to store and finally had the trunk full.  The next evening I put the kids to bed and Gib came and we began to assemble the gifts, one of which was a tin miniature doll house for Debbie.  Luckily (?) he had brought a bottle of wine and luckier still that I had lots of band aids because those damn little tabs were very sharp and the wine was very strong!  Well, and there may have been a second bottle!  I woke up on the floor and no sign of Gib.
(An aside here, I must tell you about Gib.  He was a friend of my mothers and they worked at the Red Rooster together.  Gib was gay and one of the first to die in the AIDS epidemic, when it was an epidemic. He died in California and we never knew where he was buried.  I do know when I conceived the Pueblo AIDS Memorial Quilt  he was foremost in my mind and the first panel made was for my sweet Gibbie.)
Many years have passed and many Christmas's have come and gone to bring me to this Christmas.  I do not have a tree.  I gave all my lights and decorations to my son.  I do not buy gifts.  I do not fight the crowds.  I will spend Christmas Eve in church and Christmas Day I will attend church and come home.  I am not bah humbug at Christmas, I just prefer to live with my memories.  The best part of memories is that they can be altered to fit the occasion and this year I shall have beautiful memories of wonderful children and bountiful love and I wish you all the same!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!  

Happy Birthday to me!

Well, I survived another year.  But is that good or bad?  Yesterday marked 74 years that I have been riding this big blue ball around.  I know I have good company in the form or Stephen Smalley, my cousin and my friend Mary Lou Abernathy, who I never see, and countless others that slip my mind.  All the kids checked in along with a mailbox full of cards from the dentist, insurance company, and the hearing aid place who recognizes every important moment of my life and assures me they are there to help me hear all the best wishes anytime I am ready to fork over the $4,000!  Ah, life!
I do like to look back at how far I have come from that little shack on the outskirts of Nickerson, Kansas.  That is where a mother and father made a home for 6 little Bartholomew kids.  Now there are 3 of us left.

Here I am on probably the last day that I was purely innocent.  The last day that I was completely helpless and I wonder where that blanket went!  I bet one of the younger kids got it as a handmedown, because back in those days, everything was handed down to the next kid.  Now do you realize that I got the handmedowns from my brother!

Doesn't look like he is wearing dresses, does it?  As a young girl I remember worshipping him my whole life.  We listened to the Grand Ole' Opry from Nashville, Tennesee on a car radio hooked up to a battery out on the porch on Saturday nights.  He is the one who taught me how to bait a hook and catch a fish.  He taught me how to choose the hardest clod of dirt in a plowed field and how to aim so I could hit someone in our clod fights.  He built me stilts which I fell off of and damn near broke my neck!  He dreamed of leaving Nickerson and coming back rich.  When he was 16 years old he forged his birth certificate and joined the Army.  Of course, he got caught and sent back home.

His name was Delbert Leroy Bartholomew, but in the 7th grade he became known as Shakey Jake.  That was later shortened to Jake because he did not shake.  He wore overalls and was befriended by a man in town named Roy Hasten.  Roy was an older man who had no kids and loved to fish.  I can remember him bringing Jake home and they always had catfish laid out in the back.  Some of them were really big, or at least big to my little memory.  When I hear the song "Bimbo" by Hank Williams, I think of Jake.

There is not enough paper in this world to hold all my memories of Jake.  I told you how he got that scar.  He did go away to the Army and he came home from Germany.  He married and had a son, divorced and had another son.  His second son and mine are almost the same age.  My father died in February of 1965 and Jake was killed that October.  My son was 1 month old.

10/5/37-10/31/1965

This was Mother.  I wonder if she remembered that dog?  Seems when we were growing up there was always an old cat hanging around outside, but never a dog.  Not sure I ever wanted one, but I am sure we never had one.  Dad did not like dogs.  I was always afraid of them.  There were always stories of "dogs running in packs on the outskirts of town, so be sure and keep the kids inside."  Never saw them, but like the Gypsy's (who I also never seen), we knew they were there and had to be ever vigilant.   Oh, yeah, and the cougars!  We could hear them scream down on the river and trust me, that scared the living shit right out of us.  Sure made me appreciate a home with doors.  Not that we ever locked them.  Doors had to remain unlocked in case a hobo or some homeless person needed to get in to get a drink of water or a bite to eat.  Times have sure changed.

So now I am rambling again!  I had one birthday party when I was growing up.  It was for my 8th or 9th birthday.  Mother was cleaning houses for my cousin Paralee Morris who was a teacher and was married to a teacher, so they were rich.  Paralee was the daughter of Frank and Helen Wocknitz.  Frank was the one who made Tony's Bologna and took the recipe to his grave.  She let mother make me a little party at her house and gave me a red Cinderella cookie cutter.  Birthday parties are just not a biggie with me.

(You must understand that all this stuff that I remember from 65 years ago may or may not be accurate and may change every time I remember it as well as every time you read it.  So it is best if you just read what I write and enjoy it and not try to make any sense whatsoever out of my poor befuddled mind!)

Enough about the birthday!  Fall is in the air this morning and I want to check the garden.  For some reason I would sure like to have a cigarette this morning, but I am always grateful when I realize that I gave those up.  That was a good change.  And change is what life is all about, isn't it?

Yeah, what she said.

Happy Early Father's Day to my dad, who for years wore the hat of both mom and dad, who bought me tool sets and training bras, taught me how to fish, curse, and say excuse me, who gave me the courage to stand up for what's right, and the compassion to help others. Dad, you raised some kick ass kids! We love you!

Just read this on face book and since the world has seen it I assume it is alright to put it on this blog.  I would hope the girl who wrote it would add a comment here.  It is always wonderful to see the love between a parent and child at any age.  I know this gal's situation and that makes it even more special. I confess it also made me sad.

My mom and dad were separated in age by 20 years.  That may not mean much in this day and age, but back then things were different.  The father's job was to earn the living and the mother was supposed to stay home with the kids.  It did not work that way at our house.  Momma helped with the farming when Dad share cropped.  The 2 littlest kids were carried with her and the rest of us ran wild at home.  Well, technically, Josephine was supposed to watch us and she did.  She watched us play in the mud.  She watched us chase the chickens and torture the cat.  Donna poked her finger at a turtle and she watched us try to save her.  But that was 65 years ago.

My father was a man who lived in our home.  He had no patience for us kids.  He was just there.  I always envied the kids at school who could be seen around town walking with their father.  Or walk past and see the father figure mowing the grass.  A real sand and shovel memory if you get my drift.

It was not so with my father.  I knew none of his relatives although I was named after his mother.  He had 5 children from his first wife.  A son and daughter died as infants from sand pneumonia and 3 sons  were placed in an orphanage when his wife died.  I assume she died. Two of the 3 surviving sons were adopted.  Gene was not.  I have letters he wrote to my father from the orphanage that tear at my heart.  From the letters I learned that my father was never a caring man  to any child he had.  So it was never personal.  Just one of those "It is what it is." things.  Richard served during WWII and came home shell shocked.  Today we call it PTSD.  Earl married and had 3 children.  Gene spent most of his life in prison and finally just disappeared off the face of the earth.  He left a son named Billy who I remember only as a fact, but not a person I ever met.

My father never attended my wedding or acknowledged that there ever was one.  But he surprised me.  When I had my first baby, Debra Louann, he came by the apartment and looked at her.  When he left I found a bib in her crib.  For her 1 year birthday he had my sister Josephine make her a pretty red dress and bought her a pair of red patent leather shoes.  I have a picture somewhere.  I had forgotten all about that until   I started this paragraph!  He died before my second child was born.  I wonder if things had been different if we could have actually been friends?  Maybe....

But I can not think of that tonight.  It makes me too sad.  Life is just so full of missed opportunities.  So full of roads not taken and choices not made.  As I get older I think of all the things I should have done and all the things I should have said and I wonder if the good Lord let me live though all my past just so I could finally get it.  Lizzie, I am so glad you have this time with your father and I envy you so much.

That having been said,

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Plevna, Kansas, Grandma Haas and Great Grandma Hatfield

I know I have written about my Plevna years, but in case you missed it let me go there again.  Grandma Haas, who was Mother's mother, had a stroke mys last year of grade school.  Great Grandma Hatfield was pushing 100 and could not take care of her alone, so I was sent to stay with them and do what I could.  This meant I started my Freshman year in the little Plevna High School.  The whole high school was less then 40 kids.  Plevna was a farming community and all the kids in school were farmer's kids.  I stuck out like a sore thumb.  But it was what it was and there I stayed.  I do not remember any of those kids I went to school with.  There was a family named Smith that lived catty cornered from the grandma's and I went over there sometimes, but was under strict orders not to look at their television because that was the work of the devil!


The family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and a whole bunch of girls.  I can recall 5 for sure.  I never saw a boy, so that may have been the family.  There may have been a son some where but I do not recall.  Mr. Smith had one blue eye and one brown eye.  That was something I had never seen before and have not seen since.  I see it occasionally in dogs, but never in a human.  Of course, I do not actually seek the phenomenon out, so it may slip by me undetected.

There were several things that amazed and intrigued me about the Smith family.  The first was the size of the house.  It was a two story that had never seen a coat of paint.  It must have been about 10 rooms and was lathe and plaster.  I know this because the ceiling of the foyer fell down and we were then relegated to using the back door because no one cleaned up the mess.  Later the ceiling in the front room would fall also.  That was more serious as Mr. Smith was napping on the couch under it when it collapsed and received a small cut.  We did praise God that it was not more serious!  One room contained a quilt frame which always held a quilt, but I do not know if anyone ever quilted or it was just there.

As in most homes of that era, the plumbing consisted of a privvy out back and a pump by the back door and usually one in the kitchen.  This was the other thing that amazed me about the family dynamic.  There were several wash tubs located in the kitchen.  They were there to hold the dirty dishes.  On Saturday, they heated water and washed all the dishes.  It was a bee hive of activity on that day as all the women folk were there and working feverishly to get the chore done.  When the dishes were all washed, dried, and put away it was time to heat the water and wash the clothes.  Saturdays were definitely work days at the Smith house!  Mr. Smith stayed in his chair by the window looking out at the back yard.  The dog stayed by him so it did not get stepped on by the scurrying women.  I did not go over there on Saturday.

Sunday I was expected to attend church.   Mom and dad would come for a visit about once a month.  They brought the 3 younger girls.  This was always special to me.  Dinner would be on the table when I got home.  It was always a feast and always the same fare.  Great grandma fried chicken and the rest of the meal materialized around that.   You know the comfort food thing?  Mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, green beans, homemade dinner rolls, butter, jelly and pudding of some sort or another for dessert.  Some times a cake or pie.  Celery stuffed with peanut butter.  Pickled beets and sweet pickles.  The poor table would be groaning from all the food.  Never went hungry at Sunday dinner.
As I recall we never ate after the sun went down.  Dishes were washed and back in the cupboard in very short order.  The men folk, which usually consisted of my father, sat in the rocking chair with his thumbs hooked together over his stomach.  Grandma died in January of my freshman year.  Aunt Mabel came from Coldwater and took great grandma back with her.  I returned to Nickerson and the bosom of my family.

My father.  As I recall, my father was a big man.  His skin was very white and his hair had at one time been mostly red, but not a bright red.  It was more like a reddish blonde with a tad of brown.  He had freckles on his hands which were very white and not calloused at all.  I don't remember his eyes.  He had a big stomach and always wore overalls.  He wore brown, high top shoes.  Funny the things we remember from our childhood.  I think he may have been English with a bit of Irish, but who knows.
I do not think he liked me very much.  I know Mary was his favorite, but Mary was everyone's favorite.  Mother kept all of us girl's hair very short, but Mary was allowed to let hers grow long.  We were all so jealous!  Dorothy was the baby.  Donna and I were just there as  middle children.  Josephine ran away and got married very young.  Jake forged his birth certificate to show his age as 17 when he was 15 and joined the Army.  That made me the oldest of the youngest kids at home.  I relished in that and was very bossy.

At night we played "kick the can"  with the neighbor kids.  That is a game of hide and go seek which entailed placing a can on the ground and the one who was "it" counted while everyone hid.  Then the "it" person had to find each one and bring them back to "base".  While the "it" person went to search for the remaining hidden, some one could sneak in and "kick the can" which freed the ones who were stuck in the "jail".  Game sometimes went on for hours.  In day time we had "clod " fights.  This required a freshly plowed field.  We usually chose small clods which had dried and threw them at each other.  They usually crumbled on contact, but if they had been baking in the sun several days, they tended to be a little harder and left marks.  As tempers flared, the clods got bigger and more then one tear was shed either from pain, frustration, or from an eye full of dirt!  Brother Jake decided at one time to pull out his .22 rifle.  Little shit!  The game was over for the day and he was the winner for sure.

More about Plevna later, but now I have to go tend to the geese.

Probably just lucky that damn hog didn't eat me!

Thinking back to the "good old days" is mostly just a matter of perception.  Today I am remembering Irene who lived next door.  She is the one that slipped on the trailer tire....oh wait.  I may not have told you that little story.  See, back in that time dad had horses and they were used to pull trailers, hay racks, corn wagons and mainly eat everything in sight that was green.  So this one trailer (and I can not for the life of me remember what it was called.) that was just a box and dad could put side boards on it so it held more, or leave one of the side boards off and we would pick dry ears of corn and toss them in the trailer.  The board on the one side was so when we tossed it, the ear of corn would bounce back into the trailer.

So one day the trailer was just setting there and 4 of us girls decided we wanted to "drive the trailer" to town.      The way we accomplished this was one girl got on each tire, hung on to the side, and walked on the tire causing it to roll.  Looking back, I am pretty sure it would have been a lot easier to just walk into town and leave the trailer set, but they do not call them the "good old days"  for nothing.  It was indeed a time of innocence!  Oh, and did I mention that the tail gate and the front tail gate (please do not ask me to explain why the front gate was called a front tail gate.  I am just here to relay the story!)  were held in place by a steel rod which came to end with a very sharp point?   It had to be sharp to go through the hole in the bed that held the tail gate and the front tail gate in place.  There, the scene is set.

So I got on one wheel, Irene on another, Delores (Irene's sister) on one, and I forget who was on the fourth.  Usually it was steered by whoever was driving the horses.  Pull on the left rein and the trailer went left.  Pull on the right and it  went right.  Pull back on both reins and the horses stopped and this stopped the wagon.   We had none of those finery's!   We had only our feet.  We knew if we wanted to go left it would be necessary for the two people on the left side of the wagon to walk backwards so the left wheels would not turn.  We were so busy testing our theory and celebrating our genius that we forgot what we were doing and Irene's foot slipped off the wheel..  The only thing that stopped her from falling off was the steel rod buried in her thigh.  I remember very little of the particulars of that afternoon.  I know there was a lot of screaming.  A lot of cussing and a hurried trip into Hutch in some body's old car.  I do remember seeing her leg and the wound from that rod.  What is uppermost in my mind is the amount of yellow fat that was exposed.  Man that was gross!

We all stood around looking at the offending trailer and you should know we got in more trouble over that then about anything we had done before.  We were lectured for hours about the hazards of playing on the trailer.  But we were determined that there must be a better way to get around than to walk.  Next came a metal 55 gallon barrel (I think that is right).  Hop up on that and start walking and the barrel, of course rolled.
         
Close your eyes and picture that!  The faster you walked the faster the barrel rolled.  Best part was, there was no stopping that damn thing.  The only way to escape the rolling barrel was to jump off of it!  If you could do that and land in the soft dirt of a field or ditch you were very lucky.  Believe me when I say, I was never very lucky.  After you leapt off the barrel  it continued it's journey without you and usually there was someone in it's path that was going to get bowled over.

Another favorite past time was pig pen jumping.  I know that does not sound intriguing to you, but listen!  Mr. Reinke raised pigs.  He had pens in back for each pig.  They all were joined in a row; the pens, not the pigs..  Each pig had it's own house which was kind of an upside down "v" roof and about 8 feet long.  What we liked to do was start at one end of the lot on the first roof and leap to the second roof without falling in the pig pen.  Now I know this does not sound like fun to you, but remember, we did not have television, the only radio was WSM Nashville Grand Ole" Opry on Saturday night,   and the chances of getting a new brother or sister was a lot better than the chances of getting a board game to play!  And we had rules.  Someone was always designated as the one to run for help if somebody slipped and the hog attacked them.  Luckily no one actually fell into the pen, but the old sow was there grunting and hoping!

After dark we played "kick the can, if we had a can.  If we had a can it usually meant we had eaten that day.   To say that we grew up on the wrong side of the tracks would have been an understatement and to say the people on Strong Street were "strange"  would have really been stretching reality.  Strong street and the people who lived there were what made me who I turned in to today.  I never tire of remembering my childhood home.  The last time I went back to Nickerson and Strong Street, it had all changed.  My house was gone and in it's place was a double wide trailer.  Reinke's, Smith's and Hank Windiate's houses were deserted as was Goodrick's and Ayres.  I am sure by now they are either gone or replaced.  But that does not concern  me.  They are still in my mind.  They will always be in my mind.

Sometimes I think I may have selective memory.  Maybe we weren't poor, but I am thinking that 7 of us living in a 2 bedroom house could have been a clue.  But we all grew up and did not starve.  When we left Nickerson, Mother left the 3 legged kettle we heated wash water in for so many years.  She vowed that our new home would have a hot  and cold running water and one of those indoor bathrooms.  Know what?  She was right!

Many years ago and far, far away.

Way back in the dark recesses of my mind is probably the first memory of my life.  It was before I started school.  Before sister Dorothy was born.  I must have been 4 years old when we lived on the Stroh place outside of Nickerson towards the Arkansas River.  I have many memories of that place, so we must have lived there for a while, or that was when my tiny mind was first starting to grasp things.

See there, how innocent I am?  So anyway, back to this memory.  We had an uncle. Well, we had several, but this one I am not sure how he was connected.  Was not on mom's side  unless it was a way distant one.  So it must have been one of the renegades from my dad's side.  His name was Uncle Ode.   That is all I know.  No last name.  Anyway, one day he came for a visit.  I probably seen him two times in my whole life.  Uncle Ode smoked a pipe, and like all little kids, I was fascinated with that pipe.  So he let me have puff.  I recall I must have done something because all the adults laughed.  He gave me several puff off that pipe and every time the grown ups laughed.  Then I got sick.  Oh, very sick.  And then the grown ups were not laughing any more.  Served them right, I think.

On the Stroh place, mother used to go to "Club".  I do not remember how often or where, but I remember "Club".  Us kids went with her, because there was one lady designated to watch over us and we better be good, and we better be quiet and there better not be any bad reports.  Back then parents ruled the home.   Now there is a tradition that I wish had been kept!

We had a chicken house and several times something had gotten in and got a hen.  So dad set out back and when the weasel showed up, he killed it.  Now, I do not remember our family ever owning a gun, so I am wondering just what he killed it with,  and I was way to young to remember much about that ordeal.  I think it was a weasel.  Could have been almost anything.

I remember us being on the porch one day and the cat came to the yard with a baby chicken in its mouth.  Mother dispensed Jake and the cat into the forest and I remember Jake had a hatchet.  When he came back he still had the hatchet, but I never seen that cat again.  Big yellow tom cat.

Jake and I were in charge of taking the old milk cow down to the road and letting her eat the grass in the ditch.  She would amuse herself like that for quite a while and when we seen her looking towards the house, we were supposed to go "bring her 'round".  One of our favorite ways of doing this was to grab her tail.  This would cause her to run for the barn a lot faster.  Otherwise we had to walk behind her with a switch and touch her rump when she stopped to eat grass.  That was pretty boring!  Course when we made her run, she did not give much milk.  No winning when you are 5 years old.

Sister Donna poked her finger at a turtle once and it latched on to her finger.  Much discussion on that one.  Cut it off?  No way!  It will never let go if it is dead and she will have that thing hanging on her finger for the rest of her life.  And try to catch a husband with a turtle head on your finger!  But be patient and it will let go when the sun goes down.  I do not know how that one played out, but I do not think she still has it hanging off her finger!  So it must have been resolved.

My brother Gene came home from the Army for a brief visit and then was gone and wound up in prison for writing hot checks.  But it was not his fault!  It was that damn Banks boy that made him do it.

The best part of that time in my life was learning to take care of my hair!  Sarcasm there.  The way we got haircuts back then was to have a bowl placed over our head and then trim around the edge of the bowl.  Hence the term "bowl hair cut".  This was second only to washing of the hair for pure enjoyment.  This is how that went down.  We had no hot water, and the only source of water was a pitcher pump in the corner of the kitchen.  This pumped into a sink (of sorts) which was attached to a pipe that ran through the wall and outside into the yard.  Mother would tuck me under her arm with one hand supporting my flopping head and sister Josephine would start pumping.  Ice cold water was pouring into my hair at about 7 gallons per second.  Shampoo and lather and rinse.  I learned very early not to scream , beg, and whatever I did do not wiggle or try to kick free because that just prolonged the ordeal and got my butt beat royally!  And you think you had it rough! 

Well, I could reminisce all day here, but this is not getting the chores done.   When we left the Stroh place we moved to the Ailmore place.  I think my next book may cover some of my childhood lived in abject poverty, but you know what?  I would not have it any other way!

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When you are over the hill, you pick up speed!

Well, this is one of my more recent snap shots.  I mean this is a more recent snap shot that some one else took of me.  I even look blurry.  Age is not wearing well on me.  And it is happening so fast that I am about ready to jump out of the way of this speeding train.  By the way, my shirt says "Jesus is coming!!!  Quick   Look busy!"  Well actually my shirt just hangs there and does not say anything.  I embroidered that on there as a message to those who have the idle hands in the day to day life we are forced to live.

At one point in time I was into decorating the "Necessary Room"  with wise sayings.  The first to hit the wall was one that had a sheep and said, "Ewe's not fat!  Ewe's Fluffy!"  That was followed closely by "Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most!"  I soon tired of that one and replaced it with "Either lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way!"  These little jewels were all made in counted cross stitch that I toiled long and hard over.

Well, now it is many years later and the old eyesight is matching the picture there and the counted cross stitch is a thing of the past.  I used to crochet with the smallest hook and use thread that was like a spider web and make beautiful doilies to put all over the house.  The thread I use is now rug yarn and the doilies have been replaced by a store bought kitchen towel draped through one of the handles of the stove.  I always tilled my own garden, but now I am thinking of having some one come over and do that for me.  Actually I am looking to sell the tiller and do the container gardening thing where I do not actually have to bend over.

When we moved here in 1983 it took me about 35 minutes to mow and trim the yard.  Thank God we had a hot, dry summer last year and the grass refused to grow!  The chore is now up to over an hour and that is not counting the 3 breaks I need to take to rehydrate and dry the sweat that now runs off my head in rivulets!  I thought about hiring this out to my grandson, but when I told him I would pay $20 for the work and he looked at me with disdain, I just wanted to rip his head off his body!  Proving that not only does either one of us know the value of a dollar, but also that my sense of humor is definitely down the crapper.

For the first 55 years of my life I did not need an air conditioner in the summer and a wood stove was fine in the winter.  Shoveling snow was just something I did when it fell on my side walk.  At some point in time I must have blown my thermostat, because now an air conditioner is a must and I ain't chopping that damn wood, no way.  Right before Christmas we had to really big snows and I managed to make it in or out, but this past week when I looked out in the morning and saw that crap I picked up the phone and called the step daughter.  "Was Michael on his way over or shall I go ahead and shovel this stuff myself?'  Dead silence.  We both knew the answer to that one!  And my thoughts on this were almost profound!

Why is youth always wasted on the young?  When we were kids growing up at home and it snowed, we never shoveled.  No one shoveled.  The tallest one went out first and "broke a path"  to wherever we needed to go.  Usually the first path was to the out house.  And luckily that path led past the wood pile so eliminated the need for the second path!  (My momma didn't raise no fools!)  Hopefully someone had chopped and stacked some wood on the back porch before the "storm hit" so there would be dry wood for the necessary parts of life like cooking.  We did have a propane cook stove, but we only used that on Sunday and not always then. 

Winters were hard back then.  The stove would inevitably burn out in the night so we had to rely on the pile of quilts on our beds for survival.  That and shared body heat.  Us kids slept in a pile on two beds.  Now each little angel needs their own room.  And a furnace to keep them the same temperature all night and day.  Course we did not know any better.  That was how the world turned back then.  So let me get to the point and I am sure there must be one.

I do not remember ever doing any manual labor growing up at home.  We must have because I am pretty sure there were dishes to be washed, meals to be cooked, floors to be swept and mopped, laundry to be done, chickens to be fed.  It is just that I do not remember ever doing any of that stuff back when I was young and strong and could have done it very easily.  Back when I could have made a difference in my mother's life I do not remember doing anything.  Youth is wasted on the young, like I just said.

I am drifting from my original goal because thinking back to my younger days always makes me nostalgic, so I am going to wind this up, but I will be back very soon and I am going into the years in Nickerson, Kansas in much greater detail.  For now I just want to tell you to seize the day, which in French is "Carpe diem!"  or something like that.  I now refer back to my final piece of needlework.

When you are over the hill, you pick up speed.

(And the nearer you get to the bottom, it becomes a very slippery slope!)

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