Better Late Than Never

The Very Nice Man hosted a Monday post of childhood pictures and I signed up to participate. But, life just happens and I didn't get my pictures posted on Monday...or Tuesday. So, here I am, finally, on Wednesday.

I'm three years old sitting on Granny's sofa in my pajamas with my favorite teddy bear. Mom used this picture as a Christmas card. I can't remember my bear's name, but I do recall that he was blue and white.



Ten years old and posing at the piano in my Christmas recital dress. Love those shoes and socks!


Back to age three...almost four. Sitting in a row of Granny's daffodils along her garden fence in my cowgirl outfit minus my boots. My hat and my shirt were red.


Fast forward to age fourteen. Taken with my boyfriend at a school Christmas party.






My formal senior picture pose at age seventeen.

Ava Bell

Ava Bell was my Granny W. She was born in 1897 and didn't get married until her early twenties which made her an "old" bride in that day and age. She also married a younger man by two years. She had eight children without ever stepping foot into a hospital. Her youngest child was my mother who was born when Ava Bell was 41 years old.

Look at that pretty dress and those shoes!! This picture was taken sometime during the 30's when my grandparents moved from Arkansas to Turkey, Texas, because there were better jobs there during the Depression years. Look at their two oldest sons being pranksters in the background. Don't you love those caps?! You can't see the details, but Grandpa is wearing a plaid tie.

Granny W. was one of the most influential people in my life. She was a devout Christian and was one of those lovely people who never had a bad word to say about anyone. No matter what a person had said or done, Granny always found something positive to say about them. She had her share of hardships and sorrow in her life, but she was rarely unhappy. She didn't talk about her troubles, she talked about her blessings. Her philosophy was that no matter how bad things were, there was always so much to be thankful for.

Ava Bell loved birds. Cardinals were her favorite. She would make an extra pan of cornbread to crumble up and feed "her" birds. She could identify birds by their songs. The pages of her bird book were as frayed and worn as the pages of her Bible. She also loved flowers and her house was always surrounded by a profusion of blooms.

Granny was a great cook. She canned vegetables, made jelly, baked bread and pastries, made sweet and dill pickles, canned a vegetable soup mix that was out of this world good and cooked so many other delicious foods. I remember her doing all this with a gas cook stove. My mom remembers when Granny did it all with a wood cook stove. Granny also made sauerkraut and she had a little Daisy churn that she used to make butter. Her kitchen was always full of wonderful things to eat. My mom and I have often talked about how all of us bring food to our big family holiday dinners, but when Granny was alive and we had those dinners at her house, she did all the cooking. Her daughters and daughters-in-law cleaned up and washed the dishes, but Ava Bell was The Cook.

Ava Bell was a very modest woman. See how she made sure her knees were covered before I took this picture? I can just hear her fussing at me for letting people see this picture because her slip is showing just a bit. When Granny got her Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs in the mail, she would sit down to look through them with a pen in hand. She didn't put an 'x' by things she wanted, she colored in the midriffs of the models wearing two-piece swimsuits. If a skirt was really short, she might add an ink ruffle to it. If I wore a dress that Granny considered too short and too low cut in the neckline, she would politely compliment me on my nice, wide "belt".

Oh, there are so many other things I could tell you about Ava Bell. Her life is as full of intricate pieces as the the beautiful quilts she stitched by hand. But it is late tonight and I have school tomorrow so I will have to post more about her another time.

Songbird.......The Early Years

My cousin has been going through her mom's old pictures and she (my cousin) enclosed these family photos in the Christmas card she sent to me.

I was 11 days old when this picture was taken. My dad is holding me and you can see a picture of my mom in the background. Mom wrote this on the back of the picture: "She's sure heavy. See the muscles and veins standing out." I weighed nine pounds and I can't remember how many ounces at birth. Knowing me, I had probably already gained 3 or 4 pounds in eleven days!

I am eight months old in this shot. Dad is wearing his Cities Service uniform. He eventually bought the service station where he worked at the time this picture was taken. That is my grandparent's house. We lived with them until I was three. I don't know a thing about that little backpack seat I am in. It's a nifty carrier, isn't it?

Ahhhh.....one of many lovely dresses with a pinafore that my Granny W. made for me. Look at those starched ruffles! This is an Easter picture taken when I was two. What a princess!!



One of my favorite photos of all time. This family portrait was taken in the summer right before I turned three. My dad was 24 and my mom 22. We moved into our new house later that year. The dog is Togo. He belonged to my grandparents. I still love black and tan Dachshunds!!

Every October Mom pulls Hank out of her shed and fluffs him up with some new hay, a new bandana and maybe some new clothes if he needs them. Hank has had the same hat for years. Mom sits Hank on a bale of hay, surrounds him with pumpkins and leaves him to greet anyone who passes by.

Every morning my mom eats breakfast on her front porch. If it is cold, she adds more layers of clothing and wraps herself in a blanket. Sometimes she builds a fire in her outdoor fire pit. On this particular morning, she took pictures of the last hay cutting in her little hay meadow. The sun was just peeking out over the hills behind her house to spotlight the gold tree at the edge of the meadow.

The sun rose higher and graced the ridge in the distance with its rays. It was a brisk, cool morning. See the cloud of mist on the far right? It marks the location of the pond. Later this same day, the hay was baled. Mom only got 80 bales with her last cutting, but it was the third cutting of the year. She hauled all 80 bales by herself. I was out of town on a trip with my choir kids and she just couldn't wait for me to get back and help her. Did I mention that my mom is sixty-seven?!!

I moved back to Arkansas in 1990 after having lived in several different states during the previous fourteen years. The little house I ended up buying had a wood stove. My parents had a wood stove in the house I grew up in so I wasn't totally unfamiliar with wood heating. I also had a wood stove in a cute apartment that I rented when I lived in Boulder, Colorado. The stove in Boulder wasn't my primary source of heat. It was mainly an ambiance-type thing that my landlady had added to the apartment so she could charge more rent.

See the wood stove behind the rocking chair? Ambiance. By the way, that cute kitten is Muffin, my Colorado kitty. She lived for 21 years, but I am digressing from my story.....

So I had a wood stove in my house in 1990 and I felt sufficiently experienced to handle wood heating. One day I came home from school, stoked up a fire in my stove, added some wood, closed the stove door and went outside to play with my dogs in the backyard. I don't know how long I was outside, but eventually I became aware of a funny noise emanating from my house. It finally dawned on me that I was hearing the smoke alarm. (Sound familiar, Karmyn?!!) I rushed in the back door to find my house filled with smoke. My carpet behind the stove was smouldering and flames were licking up the outside of the stove pipe toward the ceiling. Aaaiiiieeeee!!! We didn't have county-wide 911 service at the time so I had to call the county sheriff's office. I was so freaked out that I forgot to tell them my address. I did remember to give my name to the dispatcher and, luckily, I live in a small town where everybody knows everybody so when the dispatcher contacted the rural fire department, the volunteer firemen knew exactly where to come. In the meantime, I had called my parents who live a little over two miles from me. It seemed I had just barely hung up the phone when my parents' truck flew down my driveway and slammed to a halt outside. My dad leapt from the truck, fire extinguisher in hand, and hit my front door at a gallop. He had that fire extinguisher spraying the minute he entered my house. ( The wood stove was all the way across the room from my front door. ) The rural fire department arrived a few minutes later. Of course, Dad had totally put out the fire, but the firemen checked out my attic and the roof and made sure my house was secure.

The firemen left. Mom, Dad and I were left standing in my livingroom staring at the trail of fire extinguisher contents leading from my front door, across furniture and across the floor to my wood stove. We started laughing. We laughed so hard our stomachs hurt. It was the laughter of relief, but it was also laughter at my dad's mad dash and heroic squirting of fire extinguisher goop all over my livingroom. To this day I remember the vision of Dad and his fire extinguisher. I hear the Indiana Jone's theme in my mind as Dad, the hero, saved the day.

My mom, ever the pragmatist, said, "Why didn't you just throw a bucket of water on that fire and put it out?" As those words echoed in my livingroom, I realized a wood stove was not for me. I never once thought of putting the fire out with water. Duh......

I sold my wood stove and started using gas for heat. A couple of months later I received a lovely red fire extinguisher as a Christmas gift. It was from Dad......just in case.

Talking to a Smart Feller

My Grandpa W. was a handsome man. He was born in 1900 in Chidister, Arkansas. His father was a circuit riding Methodist minister. Grandpa was a lay minister in the United Methodist Church. He knew the Bible better than any person I have ever met. He could quote entire chapters and many of the Psalms. He taught an adult Sunday School class for years and years and preached from the pulpit in the ordained minister's absence. Grandpa also had a beautiful bass singing voice. He, Mom and I used to sing "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "Take My Hand Precious Lord" at church. Grandpa was a carpenter by trade, but he also worked in a grocery store, picked cotton during the Depression years and worked for the Forestry Service until he was well into his 80's.

Grandpa was also a gardener. He and Grandma planted, raised and harvested huge amounts of all sorts of vegetables. They raised the best corn I have ever tasted and Grandpa was always quite proud of his watermelon harvest. Grandpa rigged up his own irrigation system from his pond to the garden. It was quite an enterprise. Once when I was a little girl, Grandma sent me to the garden to check on Grandpa. Looking back on this as an adult, I figure Grandma really just needed to get me out of her hair for awhile, but as a child I thought I was really helping her keep an eye on Grandpa. When I arrived at the garden, I could hear Grandpa talking. He was standing in his open sided garden shed smoking a cigarette and talking.....but there was no one else there. I asked Grandpa who he was talking to and he replied, "I'm talking to a smart feller." When I finally made it back to the house, Grandma asked me what Grandpa was doing. I told her that he was smoking and talking to a smart feller. Granny shook her head and said, "That man sure thinks a lot of himself." I really didn't understand the humor until I was older, but I sure remember Grandpa talking to that smart feller alot!

Grandpa rolled his own cigarettes. He used Prince Albert tobacco which came in thin red cans. He also saved watermelon seeds from year to year and stored the seeds in empty Prince Albert cans. One year when he was older and his eyesight wasn't as good as in his younger days, he grabbed the wrong can and rolled a cigarette using watermelon seeds. He didn't notice what he had done until he tried to light up. He was probably too busy talking to that smart feller to notice the difference in texture between tobacco and watermelon seeds. I can still hear him telling that story on himself. He had a big, booming laugh that encompassed his whole body.

Grandma died in 1987. She and Grandpa had been married over 60 years. In February of 1988, on Grandpa's 88th birthday, he decided he wanted to fly out to visit with me in Salisbury, Maryland. He had never been on a plane before!! Mom and Grandpa arrived in Salisbury with the remnants of a large birthday cake. The flight crew had surprised Grandpa with a little birthday celebration on the plane. Grandpa was also proudly sporting Captain's wings pinned to his lapel. During their visit, I took Mom and Grandpa to Chincoteague which is where the picture above was taken. That was Grandpa's first and only view of the ocean.

Grandpa could be stern and bit gruff. Some of my cousins were afraid of him, but I never was. Underneath the bluster he was just......my Grandpa. He told great stories, bought me Pepsi's and Moon Pie's and helped me break up the ground and plant my first garden when he was ninety-one years old. He led a rich and full life and he really was a very smart feller.